The Sparkler galaxy is feasting its neighbors just as our own galaxy once did.
, tight groupings of ancient stars. Each of these clusters could contain around a million stars. Our galaxy currently hosts around 200 globular clusters of its own.The team, led by Swinburne University professor Duncan Forbes, and San Jose State University professor Aaron Romanowsky, examined the age of Sparkler and its surroundings looking at the abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Astronomers call these heavy elements"metals.
Looking at the galaxy's surrounding compact star clusters they realized they look like younger versions of the clusters around the Milky Way. Many are metal-rich, similar to globular clusters in the central bulge of our galaxy. The researchers also observed metal-poor intermediate-age clusters that are associated with a satellite galaxy that Sparkler is gobbling up, with its globular clusters acting as a desert.
The Sparkler galaxy is currently just 3% the mass of our galaxy, but the researchers expect it to grow via this feeding process over cosmic timescales to eventually match the mass of the Milky Way as we see it today. "We appear to be witnessing, first hand, the assembly of this galaxy as it builds up its mass — in the form of a dwarf galaxy and several globular clusters," Forbes said."We are excited by this unique opportunity to study both the formation of globular clusters and an infant Milky Way, at a time when the Universe was only 1/3 of its present age."
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