Cosmic Cannibalism (2)
The adjacent right animation
illustrates a computer simulation of the interactions in a cluster of galaxies over a
period of 10 billion years.
Interactions in a Cluster
The simulation starts with a population of disk galaxies embedded in dark
matter halos. As time goes on, violent collisions near the center gradually assemble
an extremely large giant elliptical galaxy (the size of the simulation in the horizontal direction is
1.5 megaparsecs). It is thought that interaction
sequences such as those shown in this animation
are responsible for the giant elliptical galaxies that tend to dominate the center of large clusters of
galaxies.
