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By Mike Wehner, BGR
There’s no shortage of interesting things to see in our own
galaxy, but astronomers love finding new galactic neighbors as well.
Observing other galaxies can teach scientists a lot about how the
massive structures form, live, and die.
Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers studying
distant, dim stars accidentally stumbled upon something they hadn’t
anticipated: An entirely undocumented galaxy sitting around 30 million
light-years from Earth. News of the discovery was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The
astronomers who discovered this new galaxy were originally doing a
survey of a cluster known as NGC 6752. These faint stars were being
studied so that scientists could better gauge how old the cluster was as
a whole, but that’s when they noticed what appeared to be a galaxy that
had yet to be documented.
“Our
newly discovered cosmic neighbour, nicknamed Bedin 1 by the
astronomers, is a modestly sized, elongated galaxy,” explains the
official Hubble website. “It measures only around 3000 light-years at
its greatest extent — a fraction of the size of the Milky Way. Not only
is it tiny, but it is also incredibly faint. These properties led
astronomers to classify it as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy.”
Further
observations led the astronomers to deduce that the galaxy is roughly 13
billion years old, making it roughly as old as the Milky Way. However,
its remote location and the fact that it’s not near any other galaxies
has led researchers to label it “a living fossil from the early
Universe.”
The tiny galaxy is truly off on its own, and is roughly
two million light years from the nearest large galaxy, so it’s
something of a time capsule that dates back billions and billions of
years. It’s too far away to study in any great detail with modern
technology, but its accidental discovery is definitely one for the
books.
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