Galactic Cannibalism Photographed

fuqqer writes "What does a galaxy do when it gets hungry? It eats another...Check out the story of intergalactic cannibalism on space.com, or on cnn.com. There's a oldie but goodie nature article too! This ain't no pygmy Thanksgiving in Borneo!"

Comments

Why it's important

[ghostlibrary]

It's thought that spiral galaxies are the result of mergers or collisions. Thus if we hadn't interacted with another galaxy way back when, we'd not have a spiral. Since interactions cause star formation bursts, and those kick out a lot of metals, they're great for making more potentially life-bearing systems. Cannibalism, that's just if things get too slow and close.

But that's not really why studying galaxy interactions is worth doing. A big reason beyond "it's cool to know the origins of stuff" is that there's only 2 ways to test basic physics. Either crash subatomic stuff, or look at galaxy-scale or larger. Both are the only places where really small effects in physics (like relativity or mass differences or antisymmetry effects) show up.

Subatomic is easier in some ways, as you can actually run an experiment, play with variables. In astronomy, you can only observe, classify, and hope to identify things that are similar yet different.

The famed dark matter hack, for example (hmm... my galaxies won't hold together with just stars and gas using gravity. Let me add some dark matter to keep them stable, those pesky humans won't know the difference) is a good case for continuing this study. If dark matter exists, it should also exist in our solar system, and may have properties worth investigating. If it doesn't exist, our basic understanding of physics is entirely wrong and that opens up entirely new possibilities.

So, support your local astronomers, they're determining reality around you, and letting us know where we came from!