Expansion: Big Bang or Stretching? 9
Star Streams. Some stars within our Milky Way Galaxy are moving in
paths and with velocities that show they were captured from
neighboring dwarf galaxies. The stars in each stream also have common
chemical characteristics. Most of these dwarf galaxies have been
completely =93consumed=94 by our galaxy (12). However, one of them,
Sagittarius, is still visible, but its orbit and its core of tightly
packed stars are too far away to be captured by the Milky Way=92s
gravity (13).
All this can be explained in two ways: (1) before the universe was
stretched out, Sagittarius and the consumed dwarfs were formed but
much closer to the initial Milky Way Galaxy, or (2) dark matter (if it
exists at all) was distributed in unknown ways that helped form these
dwarf galaxies and placed them in different orbits that allowed them
to be captured and cannibalized by the Milky Way Galaxy. Obviously,
hypothesis (1) is the simpler of the two.
12. =93Hundreds of small galaxies have been ripped apart by our galaxy,
creating tenuous streams of stars that slowly mix into the Milky=92s
indigenous population.=94 Rodrigo Ibata and Brad Gibson, =93The Ghosts of
Galaxies Past,=94 Scientific American, Vol. 296, April 2007, p. 41.
13. Sidney van den Bergh, =93Clumps That Survive to Tell a Tale,=94
Nature, Vol. 402, 4 November 1999, pp. 31=9632.
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