gravity tends to slow down and stretch the others and this effect is strongest when the clouds orbit in opposite directions now if there were exactly the same amount of gas clouds orbiting in all directions the orbits would drag each other into nothing over the eons and the galaxy would shrink like a deflating balloon but it's incredibly unlikely that every single orbit has its match so there's bound to be some path with more stuff going one way than the other so the galaxy shrinks in all directions except the one that includes that path just like having a ball of dough and a tortilla press eventually everything in the galaxy orbits along that one dominant path in the one winning direction since orbits are curvy the result is a flat pancake of the galaxy which is an aspect of the conservation of angular momentum which is why litaNUMBER_TOKEN looked so strange it is missing that characteristic curve now even before they found the emerald astronomers knew of a couple sort of kind of rectangular galaxies but none of them was as extreme as this one the team's first clue about what was going on here came from looking closely at its very center where a matter does seem to be in more of a conventional disc so they switched to the keck telescope in hawaii right next door to the subaru telescope they used before by using both they could discover why the center was disc shaped but the edges were more boxy looking between the two telescopes they could measure how the colors of stars changes as you move across the galaxy and again the center stuck out it's filled with blue stars while the rest of the galaxy is redder blue stars are big stars and big blue stars are young stars older stars tend to be redder in color so the diskey center is young but the boxy edges are old so researchers hypothesized that lida may be something of a train wreck they think that two small disc spirals collided edge on the gas of the two galaxies fell to the center of the newly formed one dragging and squeezing into baby stars that orbit in a disk at the center without much gas left in the outskirts of the new galaxy the stars from each original galaxy were thrown out in two directions so you have stars going side to side and stars going up and down from our perspective forming a rectangle this hypothesis is backed up by computer simulations and by the discovery of an even boxier galaxy in NUMBER_TOKEN. that one even has two distinct centers which researchers believe is further evidence that two galaxies combined into one today the boxiest galaxies we've seen are dwarfs but there is a small chance that won't always be true because in about four billion years two much bigger spirals will collide much closer to home andromeda and our milky way we cannot know exactly what the ensuing carnage will look like this far in advance but there is a chance just a chance that there could be a rectangle in our future or perhaps it might be something in the shape of a pod from today's sponsor cometier they offer pour over quality coffee that is super convenient brewed NUMBER_TOKEN times stronger and delivered in frozen recyclable aluminum capsules the coffee itself is sourced from some of the world's best specialty coffee roasters and you can pick from different roasts or decaf coffee to brew a cup at home that tastes just like a barista brewed it for you in just under two minutes for a limited time commentary has
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN perhaps it might be something in the shape of a pod from today's sponsor cometier they offer pour over quality coffee that is super convenient brewed NUMBER_TOKEN times stronger and delivered in frozen recyclable aluminum capsules the coffee itself is sourced from some of the world's best specialty coffee roasters and you can pick from different roasts or decaf coffee to brew a cup at home that tastes just like a barista brewed it for you in just under two minutes for a limited time commentary has END_SPONSOR_TOKEN