LONDON: A faint dwarf galaxy neighbouring the Milky Way has been photographed in the highest resolution yet, helping provide valuable information about the early universe.
Dwarf galaxies are peculiar objects. Like their name suggests, they are very small. Some dwarf galaxies contain as few as 5,000 stars, a mere speck in space compared to the Milky Way, which contains some 200 billion to 400 billion stars.
Because they are so small, they are also very difficult to see compared to the brightness of other objects in space. So far, around 30 dwarf galaxies have been identified in relatively close proximity to the Milky Way galaxy, although it’s possible that there could be hundreds.
One of the earliest dwarf galaxies discovered neighbouring the Milky Way is the Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy, discovered by American astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1937. Named for its location, some 280,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sculptor, the galaxy is very faint. Its stars are old and scattered far apart in a spheroidal shape, which makes it hard to see.
But that which makes it hard to see is also what makes it so very interesting to astronomers. The Milky Way galaxy is what is known as a cannibal galaxy, named because it absorbed smaller galaxies, dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Astronomers predict that in the distant future the Milky Way will in turn be cannibalised by the larger Andromeda Galaxy.
Any of these snack galaxies missed by the Milky Way still in existence today would be very old, and, as evidenced by this new photograph taken by the European Southern Observatory’s MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy is home to some old stars indeed. This classifies it as a primordial galaxy.
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