Surrounding the Andromeda galaxy, three dozen tiny galaxies aren’t behaving the way scientists expected.
NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope has trained on Andromeda for a deep dive into how its orbiting satellite galaxies formed and changed over time. What they found revealed a population of dwarf galaxies that are quite unlike the ones circling the Milky Way.
Some 2.5 million light-years away, these space neighborhoods formed the bulk of their stars long ago. But rather than halting production, as computer simulations would suggest, they continued slowly making new stars out of a stockpile of gas.
“Star formation really continued to much later times, which is not at all what you would expect for these dwarf galaxies,” said Alessandro Savino, an astronomer at UC Berkeley, in a statement. “No one knows what to make of that so far.”
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