UDGs tagged posts

Astronomers explain Origin of elusive Ultradiffuse Galaxies: How very faint Dwarf Galaxies are Born

On the left, one of the ultra-diffuse galaxies that was analyzed in the simulation. On the right, the image of the DF2 galaxy, which is almost transparent. (ESA/Hubble)

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-...

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