Asymmetrical galaxy mergers may cause some newly created black holes to be kicked out into the universe, taking a bunch of stars along with them due to gravitational wave recoil, a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests. Researchers created simulations to find out what the hypercompact stellar clusters might look like in color, appearance and spectra and how they might appear if seen through a 2D telescope.

Astronomers have figured out a new way to observe dark matter by using the light of stars that have become untethered from their original galaxies and move freely inside massive galaxy clusters, according to findings published online in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "We have found that very faint light in galaxy clusters, the intracluster light, maps how dark matter is distributed," said Mireia Montes, the study's lead author.

Mammals were proliferating long before the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers examined hundreds of fossilized mammal teeth and learned that mammals with wide-ranging diets started adapting 10 million and 20 million years before dinosaur extinction.

An analysis by Russian astronomers has turned up nearly 200 new compact elliptical galaxies, including 11 never-before-discovered "runaway galaxies" that have broken off from their star clusters and are now lost in space. "These galaxies are facing a lonely future, exiled from the galaxy clusters they used to live in," said astronomer Igor Chilingarian.

When galaxies get too big to make new stars on their own, they gobble up smaller galaxies, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "All galaxies start off small and grow by collecting gas and quite efficiently turning it into stars. Then every now and then, they get completely cannibalized by some larger galaxy," said study leader Aaron Robotham of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research. In about 5 billion years, that will be the Milky Way's fate, as it gets overtaken by Andromeda.