Posted on 04/26/2015 10:33:52 AM PDT by lbryce
Every now and then, astronomers spy a runaway star, one that’s hurling itself across its galaxy at breakneck speeds. But stars aren’t the only things that occasionally go beserker in the cosmic void: Galaxies themselves will sometimes depart home, never to return.
In fact, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have now spotted 11 renegade galaxies, screaming across intergalactic space at up to 6 million miles per hour. Each of these star blobs has surpassed escape velocity, meaning that it’s broken the gravitational bonds holding it in its cosmic neighborhood. The discovery of these lonely exiles appears this week in the journal Science.
Researchers discovered the galactic nomads while mining archives of astronomical data in search of compact ellipticals, a relatively new class of tiny galaxies that are thought to form when a group stars rip away from a much larger galaxy. Because of their formation, elliptical galaxies are typically found bunched together, or in close proximity to a bigger neighbor.
The search identified nearly 200 previously unknown compact ellipticals. But to the researchers’ surprise, 11 of these were completely isolated in intergalactic space. What’s more, isolated ellipticals were moving much faster than their cluster-bound brethren. The researchers developed a theory regarding the origin of galactic loners, which is explained in a press release:
Researchers discovered the galactic nomads while mining archives of astronomical data in search of compact ellipticals, a relatively new class of tiny galaxies that are thought to form when a group stars rip away from a much larger galaxy. Because of their formation, elliptical galaxies are typically found bunched together, or in close proximity to a bigger neighbor.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
Ping?
If an entire galaxy screams across the universe and there are no air molecules in the void, does it make a sound?
hollerin’ maybe?
Thanks shibumi.
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Good try , galaxies, but you still can’t outrace the Chinese women in Lexi for those parking spaces at Costco
What's the effect on the stars & planets within?
...screaming too?
They’ve gone to PLAID!
Oh no! Duck!
Amazing Galaxy Screaming Takeoff!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQHtskG4jjQ
Everything is relative....Even illusions.
Since the universe goes on forever (so far as we know), we can’t even see a trillion trillionth of it anyway. That would make the runaway galaxies uncountable!
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