Dwarf Galaxies … again

At www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/07/is-there-a-fundamental-flaw-in-our… is an interesting question – and it is all up for grabs. The bigger galaxies are supposed to form from a merger of smaller galaxies but the properties of dwarf galaxies do not seem to match this scenario. Eline Tolstoy from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands draws attention to this anomaly. Dwarf galaxies are the most straight forward objects astronomers can study as far as star formation is concerned. They are typically single cell star forming entitites which is a nice way of describing them – almost biological. Some scientists think they are remnants of the formation of the Milky Way that somehow got left behind and until recently astronomers were blissfully unaware they existed at all. A story that has a lot of mileage to come.