SATELLITE galaxies have a hard time of it, as their bigger neighbours brutally rip away their ability to make stars. However, it seems the process is not quite as violent as was thought, which would explain the puzzlingly long time over which some satellite galaxies continue to form stars.
In theory, a satellite galaxy orbiting a massive cluster of galaxies at high speed should gradually lose its gaseous halo, depleting all its star-forming material by the time it is pulled into the cluster. Yet recent observations by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have shown blue, star-rich satellite galaxies mixed up…
