Zesen Lin

At night, the sky is never completely black. Even far from cities, the upper atmosphere glows faintly: sunlight makes hydrogen atoms emit a reddish glow that astronomers call geocoronal emission. For a telescope, it's like a fogged-up window: it adds extra light and hinders seeing distant galaxies.

On the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster, where galaxies crowd together but haven't yet clumped into a dense mass, lies VCC 693. Outwardly, it's an unremarkable dwarf: a small cloud of stars and gas. But astronomers suspected that behind its calm appearance lurks a turbulent past.

The gas in a galaxy glows like a neon sign, and by the color of that glow, astronomers can tell how hot it is. The logic is simple: the more heavy elements (which astronomers call metals) in the gas, the better it cools. So galaxies rich in metals should have cooler gas. But new observations show the opposite.