April 28, 2015

Scheme of a three-body interaction in which a galaxy is turned into a compat elliptical then is ejected from a cluster (Image NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

There are several known cases of runaway stars such as Zeta Ophiuchi but now the Russian astronomers Igor Chilingarian and Ivan Zolotukhin of the Moscow State University’s Sternberg Astronomical Institute have found runaway galaxies. In an article published in the journal “Science”, the list 11 galaxies ejected from the clusters they used to be part of because of the gravitational interaction with their neighbors.