WASHINGTON: Astronomers have spotted 11 runaway galaxies that have been flung out of their birthplaces to wander the void of intergalactic space.
An object is a runaway if it’s moving faster than escape velocity, which means it will depart its home never to return.
An object is a runaway if it’s moving faster than escape velocity, which means it will depart its home never to return.
In the case of a runaway star, that speed is more than 500 km per second. A runaway galaxy has to race even faster, travelling at up to 3,000 km per second.
“These galaxies are facing a lonely future, exiled from the galaxy clusters they used to live in,” said astronomer Igor Chilingarian at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Moscow State University.
Chilingarian and his co-author, Ivan Zolotukhin of the L’Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulouse and Moscow State University, initially set out to identify new members of a class of galaxies called compact ellipticals.
