An international team of astronomers has found evidence that some dwarf galaxies are being eaten up by their larger neighbors , usually spiral galaxies, which thus increase in size. And it has verified that during the ingestion of dwarf galaxies long filaments of stars are produced, according to the researchers published in the Astronomical Journal .
For the past decade, astronomers had focused their studies of galaxy evolution on the closest cosmic neighborhood, formed by the so-called "Local Group" of galaxies, with just three spiral galaxies. In the new study, David Martínez-Delgado and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany) have studied more distant spiral galaxies, located about 50 million light years from Earth . And the most surprising thing is that they have obtained their results using amateur telescopes with apertures of 10 to 50 centimeters, with CCD cameras, placed in private observatories in Australia and the United States.
