Researchers have identified 11 runaway galaxies, for the first time that escaped their original homes and have been flung into space.
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 a million miles per hour. A runaway galaxy has to race even faster, traveling at up to 6 million miles per hour.
These isolated compact galaxies were unexpected because theorists thought they originated from larger galaxies that had been stripped of most of their stars through interactions with an even bigger galaxy. So, the compact galaxies should all be found near big galaxies.
Not only were the newfound compact ellipticals isolated, but also they were moving faster than their brethren in clusters.
This discovery represented a prominent success of the Virtual Observatory, a project to make data from large astronomical surveys easily available to researchers. So-called data mining could result in finding never anticipated when the original data was collected.
The study is published in the journal Science.
