Satellite galaxies can continue forming stars when they pass close to their parent galaxies

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy, its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by Arianna di Cintio, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were re...