Eight new Galaxies Found!
posted in Amazing Facts, Outer Space |
The recent discoveries made around the past two years almost doubled the number of neighbors in the Milky Way. Seven of the newly discovered galaxies are in the Milky Way, at a distance of around 100,000 to 700,000 light-years away from earth, according to Daniel Zucker, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in England.
The new dwarfs are extremely faint and diffuse and contain at most a few million stars each, Zucker noted. In fact, they are so small that he suggested calling them “hobbit galaxies.” The Milky Way, where these dwarf orbits have been found contain around 200 billion stars.
Zucker said that the present theories of galaxy formation and the mysterious substance known as dark matter say that the Milky Way could have around hundred or more surrounding dwarfs, but till the past few years only 12 of them have been known. These newly detected galaxies were found as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to create a high-resolution map of more than a quarter of the sky.
Eighth Dwarf
The eighth dwarf galaxy is located roughly around 1.4 million light-years away and is more exciting.
“It is far enough from the Milky Way that it has probably not really been affected much by the Milky Way’s gravity,” he said. “It’s actually free floating.” “This is basically the smallest, faintest, star-forming galaxy known by orders of magnitude,” Zucker said.
More to go?
There are many more such galaxies existing around the universe. When the first few stars were found it was a surprise, but soon it was realized that there were many others that were present perhaps even in dozens.