Hilo professor gets
a peek at galaxies

He will use the Hubble telescope
to view cannibalistic systems

HILO » An astronomy professor at the University of Hawaii-Hilo will use the Hubble Space Telescope to study three giant galaxies whose immense gravitational pull has corralled their smaller galactic neighbors, the university said yesterday.

The three galaxies are unusual because they are very isolated, said Michael West, an astronomy professor at UH-Hilo.

West thinks the galaxies became loners by devouring nearby galaxies over billions of years. They are between 80 million and 490 million light-years from Earth.

"Traces of X-ray gas show there was once a collection of many other galaxies there in the past," West said.

West and his team are examining hundreds of compact star clusters, most made of about a million stars, that swarm around the three large galaxies "like bees around a hive."

The clusters are so dense, they survive even when their parent galaxies are swallowed by larger galaxies.

Different size galaxies leave behind star clusters with different chemical makeups. The team hopes the clusters will reveal the type and number of galaxies that have been cannibalized by their giant neighbors.

"The star clusters provide a record of how many galaxies and what kinds of galaxies were cannibalized," West said. "Just as archaeologists are able to piece together a picture of human history from relics that they find today, we hope to use the star clusters we see in these galaxies today to reconstruct their pasts.

"This is the first time that these extreme galaxies have ever been studied in detail, so we're looking forward to learning something new," West said.

West will lead a team of five astronomers from the United States, Canada and Australia that has been granted 10 hours of viewing time with Hubble. Astronomy majors from UH-Hilo will also help with analyzing the data.

"I'm delighted to be given access to Hubble's sharp vision again," West said.

Hubble hovers about 300 miles above Earth, circling the planet every 95 minutes, and has seen galaxies that are more than 12 billion light-years away.