Randy dwarf galaxies are making billions of baby stars The Hubble telescope has picked out distant dwarf galaxies that are churning out stars at an enormous rate compared to the Milky Way. The 18 tiny galaxies – pictured below – are about a hundred times smaller than our galaxy, but they're birthing stars so furiously that they will see the number of stellar bodies double in just …
That's sort of what I have often wondered. Scientists speculate as to the whereabouts of all the anti-matter. How do we know that anti-matter didn't clump into anti-matter galaxies just like "regular" matter did? Galaxies are sufficiently far apart that an anti-matter galaxy and a matter galaxy should be able to peacefully coexist as "close" neighbors without incident.
And as a loosely related question, how do we really know that what we call the laws of physics are all the same in distant galaxies as they are here? Particularly if a distant galaxy were composed of anti-matter? Or a denser-than-usual clump of so-called dark matter (dark anti-matter?) The biggest problem of all is that we do not know what we do not know. Science marches on in search of the answers, but for now we stumble on in the feeble glow of that tiny candle representing humanity's understanding of the universe.
Beer for boffins, in exchange for knowledge/understanding/really cool pictures from deep space.
Us laypeople really need a bit more help understanding this! The implication seems to be that galaxies produce stars in proportion to their mass, in a repeating cycle of gas clouds condensing to form stars which go supernova creating gas clouds etc
So the dwarf galaxies are producing approx 10 times as many stars per unit of galactic mass than the milky way (according to my shaky calculations at least)
Which is pretty cool, but I suspect my assumptions are probably wrong, unfortunately this article (and NASA's one) doesn't provide enough info to fill in the gaps.
Any knowledgeable astronomers out there??
It is possible that these dwarf galaxies may have the same mass as our own Milky Way but a fraction of the size. As a consequence, everything would be speeded up, hence the rapid creation of new stars due to the gravitational attraction, i.e. everything is much closer together.
That's just my theory, and the barest of information available, is as good as anybody elses, if not better.
Rather than "prolific" in the sub-headline, "fecund" would have been the perfect word to use!
Also, the light from distant galaxies has taken quite some time to get here, so we're seeing what happened over there x million years ago. Makes sense to me that galaxies used to create stars more quickly than they do nowadays.
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