#ic 10

The stars you see that are making crosses are closer to us and in our galaxy; they sometimes get in the way of Hubble images and you have to look past them to see this galaxy. IC 10 is in our local group of galaxies and is a satellite galaxy of M31 (Andromeda), one of several that have been found to orbit around Andromeda in a fairly thin plane. IC 10 is also the nearest “Starburst” galaxy to our Milky Way. A Starburst galaxy is one that is undergoing a large amount of star formation, producing far more active Wolf-Rayet stars than the other neighboring galaxies. This combination of an irregular galaxy with lots of star formation strongly suggests that this galaxy recently had a close encounter or interaction with another dwarf galaxy, and that interaction triggered the star formation in this galaxy and may have disrupted its shape. What other object it might have interacted with is unknown, but it likely happened within the last 10 million or so years because starburst activity tends to only last for tens of millions of years after those gravitational interactions. -JBB Image credit: https://flic.kr/p/2ghEVvV Reference: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/779/2/L15/meta