Serial-Killing Star System Lurks In A Galaxy Graveyard

Sixty million light years from Earth, the galaxy known as NGC 1316 sits among the remains of the many galaxies it has mercilessly murdered in the last billions of years.

Peering at the far-off galaxy through telescopes like Hubble and the ‘scopes at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla site in Chile, astronomers can be pretty sure that NGC 1316 has had a violently turbulent past.

The giant elliptical galaxy has unusual dust lanes embedded in a much larger envelope of stars, as well as a number of curiously small globular star clusters – all that remains from the death of a dust-rich spiral galaxy swallowed by NGC 1316 around three billion years ago.

But the remnants of that kill aren’t the only evidence of NGC 1316′s savage past. All around the galaxy are very faint tidal tails – wisps and shells of stars that have been torn out of their place in the Universe and flung into intergalactic space. That kind of turbulent dislocation happens when another galaxy drifts too close to NGC 1316 and complex gravitational effects disturb the orbits of its stars...

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