Researchers discovered a tiny new galaxy that neighbors our own Milky Way.
The Milky Way is part of a cluster of about 50 galaxies known as the "Local Group," and scientists have now added a new member to that club, the Royal Astronomical Society reported. The new galaxy, dubbed KKs3, is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy located about seven million light years away. This type of galaxy lacks spiral arms as well as raw materials such as gas and dust crucial for star formation. These materials are believed to have been stripped away by larger nearby galaxies.
The researchers suggested existing stars in these types of mysterious galaxies that are not located near larger objects may have formed in a short burst, using up all of the available raw materials. Gaining insight into these dSph objects could help researchers understand galaxy formation in general, even outside of the Local Group.
The finding is also significant because galaxies that lack materials that lack hydrogen gas in their nebulae are extremely difficult to pick out in surveys, so scientists have to identify them by looking at individual stars. Because of these roadblocks only one other isolated dwarf spheroidal has been spotted in the local group, a finding that took place back in 1999.
"Finding objects like Kks3 is painstaking work, even with observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. But with persistence, we're slowly building up a map of our local neighbourhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought. It may be that are a huge number of dwarf spheroidal galaxies out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos."
In the future the team will look for additional nearby dSph galaxie scuh as the James Webb Space Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
