“The Missing Satellites” tagged posts

Faint Dwarf Galaxies in Fornax cluster shed light on a Cosmological Mystery of “The Missing Satellites”

Faint dwarf galaxies in Fornax shed light on a cosmological mystery

Image of the inner 3 square degrees of the NGFS survey footprint compared with the size of the Moon. Low surface brightness dwarf galaxies are marked by red circles. Gray circles indicate previously known dwarf galaxies. The dwarf galaxies, which vastly outnumber the bright galaxies, may be the “missing satellites” predicted by cosmological simulations.

The discovery was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Computer simulations of the evolution of the matter distribution in the Universe predict that dwarf galaxies should vastly outnumber galaxies like the Milky Way, with hundreds of low mass dwarf galaxies predicted for every Milky Way-like galaxy...

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