Cannibal Galaxies Ate Their Neighbors?
Thursday, March 4, 2010 - 11:56
in Astronomy & Space
Cosmic oddities have set astronomers onto ‘the case of the missing neighboring galaxies’. Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17 is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky known as a fossil group. Astronomers use that term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies but are they really like fossils, the last remnants of a once-active community, or did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors? read more