So just a few days after my previous Astrobite summarizing the ASA meeting I got a surprise when I woke up to an email from the Astrobites scheduler saying that he'd posted my Astrobite I wrote for the queue back in February. This one deals with an interesting problem I'd never heard of before called the “Satellite Planes of Galaxies problem.” Observations of he Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and Centaurus A show that a significant fraction of the satellite galaxies around them tend to orbit in correlated planes. Yet similar-looking structures are vanishingly rare in simulations, to the point where it would be exceedingly unlikely to find them around three galaxies so close to each other. It's pretty interesting as while we've had hints of theses planar structures around the Milky Way for a few decades and Andromeda for a little less it's only recently that we've really been able to confirm them and discover the one around Centaurus A.
Something amusing I found in this paper was the name for the structure around the Andromeda Galaxy, which is called the “Great Plane of Andromeda.” This sounds like a reference to a very old name for the Andromeda galaxy, several hundred years ago when it was known as the Great Nebula in Andromeda. I just like the idea that anything associated with the galaxy becomes known as the “Great ____ in/of Andromeda.” A hui hou!
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