Cosmic accidents are frequent occurrences in space: two or more disk galaxies collide and form elliptical systems. These contain regions in which the stars orbit the centre in precisely the opposite direction to what happens in the rest of the galaxy. Previous attempts to explain this assumed the colliding galaxies had a special relative orientation (“retrograde”). Athanasia Tsatsi, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, has now found a further possibility: the mass loss of the galaxies involved acts as a kind of huge rocket engine.
Galaxies about to collide: Snapshots from the simulation in which Athanasia Tsatsi was able to prove the effect of the galactic rocket engine. Left: galaxies before the merger; right: the result afterwards.
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