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ShareJan. 12, 1998 —
Johns Hopkins University astronomers have seen evidence that a huge galaxy, about 50 million light years from Earth, removes clusters of stars from neighboring galaxies.
The team of astronomers, led by graduate student Eric Neilsen, used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to learn the distances to several galaxies, determine which of them are satellites of the much larger galaxy and then examine groups of stars -- called globular clusters -- in each galaxy.
Inside the large galaxy, the astronomers found clusters of stars that likely formed in the satellite galaxies; the discovery suggests that large galaxies can have a significant effect on smaller neighbors, not only on the general distribution of individual stars but also on the clusters of stars associated with those neighbors, Neilsen said.
The astronomers presented their findings on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 1998, in a poster paper on display during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The paper's authors were Neilsen and Johns Hopkins astronomers Zlatan Tsvetanov and Holland Ford. Neilsen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. His advisors are Tsvetanov, a research scientist, and Ford, a professor, in the same department.
The research relates to the evolution of elliptical galaxies; they are roughly spherical, compared to another common type of galaxy, such as the Milky Way, which has a disk shape. Using data from the Hubble telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, the astronomers observed satellite galaxies in orbit around a giant elliptical galaxy called M87, which is seen in the constellation Virgo.
The observations revealed that M87 apparently contains star clusters that originally were from two neighboring galaxies, which are named NGC4486B and NGC4478. The research specifically studies the history of the smaller satellite galaxies. Previous work has shown that these galaxies have compact shapes, and their outer parts seem to have disappeared.
"One model for why this has happened is that these parts have been stripped by a neighbor," Neilsen said. "Our data indicate that where the unclustered stars that make up most of the galaxy appear to have been stripped, the globular clusters also appear to have been stripped."
The satellite galaxies themselves contain fewer star clusters than they should in their outer regions; the frequency of clusters falls off dramatically with increasing distance from the centers of the satellite galaxies, suggesting that they were stripped away by M87.
The astronomers confirmed that the clusters of stars came in two distinct colors, informally referred to as "red" and "blue." Furthermore, they discovered that the red clusters are found primarily near the center, while the blue clusters are seen both in the center and in the outer reaches of M87. These findings support a theory that M87 formed through the merger of smaller galaxies; the theory predicts that most of the red clusters should be located near the center of M87, while the blue ones should still be found in the outer sections of the galaxy as well.
In 1994, Ford and Tsvetanov were among astronomers who used the Hubble telescope to find strong evidence for the presence of a massive black hole in the center of M87.
(Journalists may obtain an image of M87 and its companion galaxies from the World Wide Web at http://adcam.pha.jhu.edu/~neilsen/press/m87map.html. A hard copy of the image also is available by calling Emil Venere at the Johns Hopkins Office of News and Information at 410-516-7160.)
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