This DWARF GALAXY is a pretty look at a potential cosmic food.

Bad Astronomy:

DDO 190 is small, but not tiny: about 15,000 light years across. That’s about 1/6th the size of our galaxy. It’s also well outside our Local group of nearby galaxies (the Andromeda galaxy is less than 3 million light years distant from us, for comparison) and is thought to be part of the M94 galaxy group. But if true it’s fairly isolated even from the others on its team; the nearest neighbor appears to be another dwarf galaxy several million light years away from it.

This image is pretty nifty. For one thing, you can see lots of far more distant background galaxies, some right through DDO 190, which always gives me a kick. But the dwarf galaxy itself has some surprises. The bluish fuzzy regions are clouds of gas lit by young, hot stars. These stars don’t live long (a few million years or so), meaning there’s still some star birth going on in the little guy. That blue patch at the bottom is the brightest of them – it looks a bit like a more distant galaxy, but don’t be fooled.

Interestingly, it has two different populations of stars in it. The younger ones I mentioned (100 million years or younger) tend to be close in to the center, while older ones (4 billion years or more) are located in the outskirts. This is common in dwarf irregular galaxies. The older stars may be showing us what the primeval galaxy looked like, but now a burst of star birth has occurred near the center, making the galaxy look more condensed.

Since the vast majority of galaxies in the Universe are dwarfs like this, we think bigger ones like ours get to their size by gravitationally colliding with and absorbing dwarfs. In fact, we know the Milky Way is eating several right now!