Brilliant births and destructive deaths of stars might take a runt of a galaxy and stretch it to become a ghostly behemoth, new computer simulations show. This process could explain the origin of recently discovered dark galaxies, which can be as wide as the Milky Way but host roughly 1 percent as many stars.
Since 2015, astronomers have found hundreds of these shadowy systems lurking in and around several clusters of galaxies (SN: 12/10/16, p. 18). How these dark galaxies form is a puzzle. But prolific star formation and blast waves from exploding stars could be responsible, researchers suggest in a paper to appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.