Supporting evidence includes the dark dust lanes uniquely indicative of a spiral . What remains unexplained are the unusually small globular star clusters , visible as faint dots on the above photograph . Most elliptical galaxies have more and brighter globular clusters than evident in NGC 1316 . Yet the observed globulars are too old to have been created by the recent spiral collision . One hypothesis therefore holds that these globulars survive from an even earlier galaxy that was subsumed into NGC 1316.
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