While astronomers already knew that cosmic winds travelling through galaxies could cause star formation to come to an end by sweeping out interstellar material, new observations of a nearby galaxy have given them a better look at exactly what this process entails.

Their research, led by experts from Yale University and detailed in the Astronomical Journal, looked at Hubble images of a spiral galaxy in the Coma cluster, which is located approximately 300 million light years away and is the closest high-mass cluster to our solar system.

Lead author and Yale astronomer Jeffrey Kenney, who first encountered these images back in 2013, analyzed them to see how the cosmic wind was eroding dust and gas located at the leading edge of the galaxy. The wind, also known as "ram pressure", is caused by the orbital motion of the galaxy through hot gas in the cluster, the researchers explained in a statement Monday.

Kenney found a series of intricate dust formations on that disk's edge as cosmic wind started to make its way through the galaxy, and while the gas and dust appeared to be piled up in one long ridge on the leading side, he found head-tail filaments protruding from the dust front that might have been caused by the separation of dense gas clouds from lower density gas.

Loss of gas will mark the end of star formation

Lower-density clouds of interstellar gas and dust can be easily carried by the cosmic winds, the study authors explained, but higher-density clouds cannot. As the winds blow, the denser gases begin to separate from lower density gas, which gets blown down stream. However, both higher and lower density lumps appear to be bound together, likely by magnetic fields.