The Geminid meteor shower, considered by many to be the best meteor shower of the year, runs through the first couple weeks of December and peaks the morning of Dec. Using the Gemini North telescope near the summit of Maunakea, the team identified more than 100 of these missing-link galaxies that show every stage of the transformation process. So an international team of astronomers conducted a systematic search for these intermediate-stage objects around the Virgo Cluster, a grouping of thousands of galaxies in the direction of the constellation Virgo. However, previous searches have not revealed the large population of galaxies-in-transition that you would expect to find. The idea that UCDs are remnants of disrupted dwarf galaxies has been proposed since they were discovered more than two decades ago. A new galaxy survey, however, fills in these missing pieces to show that many of these enigmatic objects are likely formed from the destruction of dwarf galaxies. The missing piece to this puzzle has been a lack of sufficient transitional, or intermediate objects to study. Being more compact than other galaxies with similar mass, but larger than star clusters - the objects they most closely resemble - these mystifying objects have defied classification. Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies are among the densest stellar groupings in the Universe.
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