{"id":245737,"date":"2026-10-21T05:06:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T10:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/undergraduate-student-may-have-solved-puzzle-regarding-isolated-galaxies-that-have-stopped-producing-stars"},"modified":"2026-10-21T05:06:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T10:06:08","slug":"undergraduate-student-may-have-solved-puzzle-regarding-isolated-galaxies-that-have-stopped-producing-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/undergraduate-student-may-have-solved-puzzle-regarding-isolated-galaxies-that-have-stopped-producing-stars","title":{"rendered":"Undergraduate student may have solved puzzle regarding isolated galaxies that have stopped producing stars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/undergraduate-student-may-have-solved-puzzle-regarding-isolated-galaxies-that-have-stopped-producing-stars2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>An undergraduate astrophysics student at UC Berkeley has found three unusual galaxies\u2014cataloged as Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II and III. Each galaxy is far from other galaxies and has stopped making stars, a combination that is extremely rare. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provides compelling observational evidence of a long-held astronomical theory.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDwarf galaxies exist both in isolation and as satellites around larger galaxies like our own Milky Way,\u201d said Julian Shapiro, the study\u2019s sole author, who conducted his research while still in high school. \u201cIn isolation, these galaxies are expected to be actively forming stars, as there are no larger galaxies to strip their star-forming gas, but the galaxies I discovered break this rule.<\/p>\n<p>My paper argues that they may be among the first resolved \u2018backsplash\u2019 galaxy candidates, or galaxies that once passed close to a large neighbor, whose pressure removed their gas, before being flung outward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An undergraduate astrophysics student at UC Berkeley has found three unusual galaxies\u2014cataloged as Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II and III. Each galaxy is far from other galaxies and has stopped making stars, a combination that is extremely rare. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provides compelling observational evidence of a long-held astronomical theory. \u201cDwarf [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}