Imagine finding a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have discovered the astronomical equivalent of prehistoric life in our intergalactic garden: a group of small and ancient galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to evolve. These “late flowering plants” are road to build a large elliptical galaxy. Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are usually observed to billions of light years and produced so there are billions of years. But these galaxies, members of the Hickson Compact Group 31, are relatively close, only 166 million light years.
The new images of these galaxies by the Hubble Space Telescope provide an overview of what has usually occurred in the formative years of the Universe . When large galaxies were created from smaller pieces. The comments Hubble have added important clues to the history of this quartet Interaction . Allowing astronomers to determine when the meeting began and predict future merger . Astronomers know that the system was there for a while, because the oldest stars in some of his old globular clusters are aged about 10 billion years. The meeting, however, continued its course for a few hundred million years, a blink of an eye in cosmic history.
Wherever astronomers have looked into this compact group, they found groups of star clusters recently born and regions that are brimming with star birth.
Click to continue »
