As a result of its interaction with IC 4970, one of the arms of NGC 6872 looks likes it may be spinning off to form its own dwarf galaxy.
He notes it could be part of the Sagittarius stream, a remnant of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, long assumed to be one of the building blocks of our own Milky Way.
FORBES: Astronomers Confirm Milky Way's Most Distant Stellar Stream
Or the Gemini stream could be a remnant of another as yet undetected dwarf galaxy still in the process of being torn asunder by gravitational tidal interactions within our own Milky Way.
FORBES: Astronomers Confirm Milky Way's Most Distant Stellar Stream
The Hubble Space Telescope recently spied a cluster of young blue stars surrounding a rare mid-weight black hole that suggests the black hole was once at the center of a dwarf galaxy.
The violent encounter would have stripped away most of the dwarf galaxy's stars, but it also could have compressed the gas around its central black hole, triggering a new wave of star formation.
"The fact that there's a very young cluster of stars indicates that the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very low-mass dwarf galaxy, "Sean Farrell, of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia, said in a statement.
The observations suggest that the young stars must be less than 200 million years old, meaning the collision between the parent galaxy and its dwarf likely occurred around that time.
Such stellar streams are believed to be the last remnants of dwarf galaxies destroyed by gravitational interactions with our own burgeoning galaxy.
FORBES: Astronomers Confirm Milky Way's Most Distant Stellar Stream
An analysis of small, dim "red dwarf" stars - which make up a majority of stars in our galaxy - shows that 6% of them host such a planet.
BBC: Exoplanets near red dwarfs suggest another Earth nearer
Based on models of galaxy formation, for years theorists have expected to find a lot more of these dwarf galaxies around our own Milky Way.
FORBES: Astronomers Confirm Milky Way's Most Distant Stellar Stream
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