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Galactic Pancake Mystery Solved

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the galactic-syrup-lay-undiscovered dept.

mOoZik writes "According to the BBC, Astronomers have figured out why a series of small galaxies surrounding the Milky Way are distributed around it in the shape of a pancake. Theorists believed that the eleven dwarf galaxy companions should have a diffuse, spherical arrangement, but a University of Durham team used a supercomputer to show how the galaxies could take the pancake form without challenging cosmological theory."

2 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Remind you of anything? by Daxx_61 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This sounds a little like planetary formation. What if these 'halos' were really rings, due to some sort of spin in the original setup? Do they have to be a 3-dimensional halo? I am not an astronomer, but it sounds reasonable to me - could someone please explain this?

    --
    Quoth the server, "404."
  2. Re:A Quick Question by Bastian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So what you're saying is that you have to have the matter in the galaxy orbit (more or less) around a common axis, like in our solar system.

    What would cause this to happen, instead of there being a bunch of randomly-oriented orbits?

    (I suppose I am making the critical assumption that the distribution of matter immediately after the big bang was uniform, and I'm sure any cosmologist would be happy to smack me down over that, but I'll ask anyway.)