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Galaxies are some of the largest clearly defined structures in space. There are trillions of them, and many are clustered around each other. But how does that clustering affect them? That\u2019s been a question for a while, and older papers have yielded contradictory results. Now, a new paper analyzing millions of galaxies from researchers at the University of Washington, Yale, and several other institutions shows a clear pattern that had been debated before \u2013 galaxies surrounded by other galaxies tend to be larger.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n The path to that conclusion was a long one. Several other surveys showed that galaxies in \u201cdense environments\u201d were both larger and smaller. However, these studies were only conducted using a relatively limited dataset of hundreds or thousands of galaxies. So, the researchers in the new paper, led by Aritra Ghosh, a postdoc at UW, thought, \u201cWhy not get more data?\u201d<\/p>\n So they did, using the Subaru telescope\u2019s Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. This survey captured high-quality data on millions of galaxies for the first time, so the researchers were able to select 3 million galaxies with the best datasets from the cream of the crop.<\/p>\n \n