dwarf galaxies tagged posts

Dark matter is one of science’s greatest mysteries. It doesn’t absorb, reflect or emit light, so we can’t see it. But its presence is implied by the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies.

Although dark matter makes up about 85% of the cosmos, scientists know very little about its fundamental nature.

Theories abound, and research by Clemson University postdoctoral fellow Alex McDaniel provides some of the most stringent constraints on the nature of dark matter yet. His research also reveals a small hint of a signal that if real, could be confirmed sometime in the next decade or so.

The work is published in the journal Physical Review D.

“With data collection and new discoveries in the future, thi...

As their name suggests, ultradiffuse galaxies, or UDGs, are dwarf galaxies whose stars are spread out over a vast region, resulting in extremely low surface brightness, making them very difficult to detect. Several questions about UDGs remain unanswered: How did these dwarfs end up so extended? Are their dark matter halos – the halos of invisible matter surrounding the galaxies – special?

Now an international team of astronomers, co-led by Laura Sales, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, reports in Nature Astronomythat it has used sophisticated simulations to detect a few “quenched” UDGs in low-...

Surprising finding challenges current theories on how galaxies grow. Three dozen dwarf galaxies far from each other had a simultaneous “baby boom” of new stars, an unexpected discovery that challenges current theories on how galaxies grow and may enhance our understanding of the universe.

Galaxies more than 1 million light-years apart should have completely independent lives in terms of when they give birth to new stars...

The question of how small, dwarf galaxies have sustained the formation of new stars over the course of the Universe has long confounded the world’s astronomers. An international research team led by Lund University in Sweden has found that dormant small galaxies can slowly accumulate gas over many billions of years. When this gas suddenly collapses under its own weight, new stars are able to arise.

There are around 2,000 billion galaxies in our Universe and, while our own Milky-Way encompasses between 200 and 400 billion stars, small dwarf galaxies contain only a thousand times less. How stars are formed in these tiny galaxies has long been shrouded in mystery.

However, in a new study published in the research journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a resea...