Tag: Galaxies

New findings from the Gaia space telescope indicate the Milky Way may have cannibalized a small galaxy not too long ago, cosmically speaking. In fact, the last major collision between our galaxy and another seems to have occurred billions of years later than previously suspected. The Milky Way has been long understood to have grown via a series of violent collisions, which see smaller galaxies ripped apart by the immense gravitational influence of our solar system’s spiral home. These collisions distribute stars from the devoured galaxy across the halo that…

An amateur astronomer from Italy has discovered five new dwarf galaxies around a distant spiral galaxy — a spiral that’s one of the largest galaxies in the sky over Earth. His name is Giuseppe Donatiello, and those five dwarf galaxies are now named Donatiello V, Donatiello VI, Donatiello VII, Donatiello VIII, and Donatiello IX (Do V, Do VI, Do VII, Do VIII, and Do IX). “Out of eleven discoveries, nine galaxies bear my name. To my knowledge, I am the first and only amateur astronomer to have galaxies named after them,”…

When astronomers look at galaxies, they’re often conducting a sort of archaeology. Well, cosmic archeology.  Basically, by examining what a galaxy looks like and how it interacts with its nearest galactic neighbors, it’s possible to reconstruct that galaxy’s history. And one tool that astronomers can use for such work is the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the world’s largest visible-light telescope. Now, the VST has released a triptych of images depicting some of those distant galaxies necessary in uncovering galactic pasts. One image depicts ESO 510-G13, a galaxy 150 million light-years…