Don't judge a galaxy by its cover: Astronomers develop new tool to find merging galaxies

Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Don't judge a book by its cover, and don't judge a galaxy by its image alone. Today, at the 233rd AAS meeting in Seattle, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) announce that they have developed a new tool to find otherwise-hidden galaxy mergers in data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey of SDSS. These results show that by going beyond simple searches for merging galaxies based just on how they look, astronomers wil...