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from the it's-a-galaxy-Jim,-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
Not all galaxies sparkle with stars. Galaxies as wide as the Milky Way but bereft of starlight are scattered throughout our cosmic neighborhood. Unlike Andromeda and other well-known galaxies, these dark beasts have no grand spirals of stars and gas wrapped around a glowing core, nor are they radiant balls of densely packed stars. Instead, researchers find just a wisp of starlight from a tenuous blob.
"If you took the Milky Way but threw away about 99 percent of the stars, that's what you'd get," says Roberto Abraham, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto.
How these dark galaxies form is unclear. They could be a whole new type of galaxy that challenges ideas about the birth of galaxies. Or they might be outliers of already familiar galaxies, black sheep shaped by their environment. Wherever they come from, dark galaxies appear to be ubiquitous. Once astronomers reported the first batch in early 2015 — which told them what to look for — they started picking out dark denizens in many nearby clusters of galaxies. "We've gone from none to suddenly over a thousand," Abraham says. "It's been remarkable."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:34AM
Thinking about the possibility more... The narrative is that humans used to think the earth was the center of the universe, then that it orbited the sun, then that the sun was a rather typical star orbiting the center of a galaxy consisting of >billions of other stars, amongst >billions of other galaxies. Extrapolating further, what if Earth is basically in the pit of an intergalactic quarry? All the most useful stuff has already been excavated, now all of value remaining in our section of the universe is the raw EM energy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:16PM
Or alternatively, we are actually latecomers because our galaxy (and the others with many stars) is not particularly life-friendly and thus it took a long time until we developed. This also explains why we haven't met extraterrestrials: In our galaxy there's only life on earth, and those in other galaxies are too far away for us to find them. Maybe in a billion years our galaxy will look star-starved, too, because by that time we'll have used up all those stars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:10PM
In our galaxy there's only life on earth
That's some statement to make. Over 500,000,000,000 stars, and most likely over 5,000,000,000,000 planets or planet-sized object, and we are the only planet with life? That's like a bacteria saying, since it didn't find any life in its half a second second it has been aware of its surroundings, that it is the only lifeform on this Earth. I would say, that some some fucking arrogant bacteria!