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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: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:43PM
We don't know shit about the cosmos ...
I mean, seriously. I grew up being told by a few adults that there probably wasn't other planets in the whole universe (sounded weird when we got so many), we found thousands as soon as we learnt how to look.
We knew everything about galaxies, and suddenly some says "hey this one has a giant black hole in it", to which other replied "well, that's an outlier". Fifteen minutes later, every galaxy has a massive black hole in the center.
Now there might be a whole of extra galaxies of a new type?
Now, we do know a lot about the cosmos. It's actually gobsmackingly amazing, how a bunch of tiny brains came up with so many models and theories, which explain most of what we observe millions of light-years away.
But if anyone tells you that we clearly know how it works, so we shouldn't waste our time paying people to keep looking, they aren't paying attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @03:05AM
welcome to science