The suspect appears to be the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way's companion galaxies, while the victim is another nearby galaxy—the Small Magellanic Cloud. (See galaxy pictures.)

While surveying nearly 6,000 stellar giants in the neighboring large galaxy, astronomers came upon the crime scene using the 4-Meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile. The team discovered that more than 5 percent of the galaxy's stars were spinning in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, analysis of these oddball stars' light signatures, or spectra, revealed a very different chemical makeup compared with most stars in the large cloud. For example, the oddities had much lower