More Milky Way Cannibalism

Darkchilde · #1 by **Darkchilde** » Nov 30, 2011 8:03 am

From physorg.com: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-beast-tails.html

A team of astronomers led by Sergey Koposov and Vasily Belokurov of Cambridge University recently discovered two streams of stars in the Southern Galactic hemisphere that were torn off the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. This discovery came from analysing data from the latest Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and was announced in a paper released today that connects these new streams with two previously known streams in the Northern Galactic hemisphere.

"We have long known that when small dwarf galaxies fall into bigger galaxies, elongated streams, or tails, of stars are pulled out of the dwarf by the enormous tidal field," said Sergey Koposov.

Continued here: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-beast-tails.html

The Milky Way has "devoured" a number of smaller galaxies, and this is one mechanism by which galaxies grow in size. Both devouring small galaxies and merging among galaxies is quite common in the universe it seems. There are a number of beautiful examples of such encounters, like the Antennae galaxies, which are in the process of merging