[Click to embiggen, or grab the monster 3800 x 3800 pixel version<\/a>. They have wallpapers<\/a>, too.] <\/p>\n ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light years from Earth. In this picture it looks like it’s surrounded by other galaxies, but that’s an illusion: all the other galaxies you see here are either much closer to us or much farther away. ESO 306-17 is actually a loner, sitting all by itself in space.[Update: Or almost all alone; Michael West, who led the team that took these images, tells me the little elliptical at the bottom left of ESO 306-17 may be interacting with it. It’s difficult to tell; but what is certain is that there are very few galaxies near the big one, far fewer than you’d expect.]<\/em><\/p>\n How can a galaxy get this big and yet be sitting in a giant void? Easy. It ate all the neighbors. We know this is how galaxies grow in size, and is even why the Milky Way is a giant among galaxies<\/a>. Like our galaxy, ESO 306-17 has a lot of globular clusters around it, just as you’d expect if it ate a bunch of other galaxies.<\/p>\n When I downloaded the bigger image, I noticed this weird galaxy on the left:<\/p>\n Wow. I’m guessing that long stretched-out junk is a small galaxy that got shredded, maybe after a close pass to that spiral. I thought for a moment the spiral might be active — that is, the black hole in its core was actively eating matter and ejecting long jets of gas and light — but the core itself is not bright, as you’d expect. Plus, the material is lumpy and irregular, more indicative of a cosmic collision in progress. It’s unrelated to the elliptical, but still very cool.<\/p>\n I really urge you to download the big image and take a nice, long look at it. There’s a lot to see, and it’s all really beautiful.<\/p>\n Image credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO)<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n Do cannibals have friends? I imagine some must… unless they have them over for dinner. Just like the giant elliptical galaxy ESO 306-17, which you can see in this gorgeous Hubble picture: [Click to embiggen, or grab the monster 3800 x 3800 pixel version. They have wallpapers, too.] ESO 306-17 sits about a billion light […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":657,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2Sn6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/657"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"ESO-306-17\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/files\/2010\/03\/ESO-306-17.jpg?resize=610%2C606\" "\\"ESO-306-17\\"")
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<\/p>\n![\"ESO-306-17_detail\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/files\/2010\/03\/ESO-306-17_detail.jpg?resize=610%2C534\" "\\"ESO-306-17_detail\\"")
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