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Milky Way 'Ate' Smaller, Weaker Galaxy

Posted by michael on from the galaxivorous? dept.

Kierthos writes: "In a true sign of survival of the biggest, astronomers and scientists now believe that the Milky Way 'ate' a smaller galaxy billions of years ago. They believe that this could shed some light on the origin of the universe, although their search only included 1500 "sun-like" stars (far short of the 10,000 stars they want to search). Check out the article here."

1 of 5 comments (clear)

  1. Galaxy's aren't "solid"? by tooth · · Score: 3
    Seeing as there are virtually no posts here, I'd thought that I'd chip in with my meager little post.

    hmmm, the article wasn't very descriptive and fairly light weight, but hey, it's cnn. What I don't understand is how could two galaxies "merge" unless they were heading in very similar directions. As the distance between stars is so great, wouldn't most pass through and not touch anything? Of course there's gravity, which is where this seems strange -- How could the milky-way retain so much ot it's spiral structure? Wouldn't they rip each other apart and send stars left and right?

    So, I'm guessing for this to happen one galaxy would be very much smaller than the other, and that they would have to been heading on very similar paths in the universe (3 dimensional thinking? gawd hadn't thought of any more).

    The article stated that finding the stars still with the other galaxys' orbit. If this is posible, wouldn't they keep moving straight through? No, gravity would probably change the orbits. So I guess that they are looking for stars with non-normal orbits, but as to keeping the original orbit? I kinda doubt it. Okay, he said "similar", but still? Could merging galaxies settle down, buy a nice quite lot out in the suburbs of the universe and raise thier own little satellite universes?

    -- tooth, trying to post something on topic :)