* Astronomy

Mergers of Galaxy Clusters Can Trigger Star Formation

An international team of astronomers, led by Andra Stroe of Leiden Observatory and David Sobral of Leiden and the University of Lisbon observed the merging galaxy cluster CIZA J2242.8+5301, nicknamed the 'Sausage'. They used a custom-designed set of narrow-band filters mounted on the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope, the multi-object spectrograph, Autofib-2, on the William Herschel Telescope, and some other telescopes in Hawaii. They find that far from 'watching from the back' the cluster galaxies were transformed by the shock wave, triggering a new wave of star formation.
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