It happened 2.3 million light years away and took 3 billion years: time-lapse picture shows one galaxy eating up another.
By Steve Connor SCIENCE EDITOR
The Independent (London)
As cosmic events go, this one is hard to beat. Scientists have built up a dramatic time-lapse picture of one galaxy swallowing up another in a cannibalistic act that takes place over a period of 3 billion years - about as long as it took for slime-like Earthlings to evolve into humans.
Astronomers have been able to witness a feature of galaxy evolution that they have long suspected, but have been unable to visualise, in which one swirling mass of stars devours another that has come within its gravitational sphere of influence.
A telescopic study of the Andromeda galaxy some 2.3 million light years away, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way that can be seen with the naked eye, has exposed the galaxy's immense gravitational tides that are eating away at the smaller Triangulum galaxy as it slowly orbits its master.
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