By Ron Cowen
Pity the ravaged galaxy known as C153. As far as astronomers can tell, this eviscerated body once resembled a grand spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, its several slender, starlit arms wrapping around a brilliant disk. That was before the distant galaxy began crashing through a crowded cluster of galaxies, an encounter that has ripped away most of C153’s gas and left the galaxy with a single, skeletal arm. The galaxy appears destined to lose even that vestige over the next 100 million years, turning into a featureless disk of old stars.
For the past decade, William Keel of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and his colleagues have been meticulously documenting the travails of C153. The team uses data from a battery of telescopes that view the galaxy at wavelengths ranging from radio to X-ray.