Bizarre Galaxy Discovered With Seemingly No Stars Whatsoever:
A newly discovered object is stretching our understanding of what constitutes a galaxy.
Called J0613+52, this massive blob of something some 270 million light-years away appears to have no stars whatsoever. At least, none that can be seen. It's just a haze made of the kind of gas that's found between stars in normal galaxies, drifting around by its lone self like an absolute badass.
Its mass and motion appear to be normal for what we'd expect of a spiral galaxy... in fact, if you extracted the stars from a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way or Andromeda, J0613+52 is pretty much what you'd end up with.
According to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O'Neil of the Green Bank Observatory, it could be the first discovery of a primordial galaxy in the nearby Universe – a galaxy made up mostly of the gas that formed at the beginning of time.
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A nearly invisible dwarf galaxy is challenging the model of dark matter. An international team of astronomers, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL) and other institutions, discovered this fascinating galaxy dubbed "Nube."
Nube, which means "Cloud" in Spanish, was named by the 5-year-old daughter of one of the researchers, aptly reflecting the galaxy's ghostly and diffuse appearance. Its discovery is significant because its faint surface brightness allowed it to remain undetected in previous sky surveys, despite its considerable size.
"With our present knowledge we do not understand how a galaxy with such extreme characteristics can exist," says study first author Mireia Montes, researcher at the IAC and the ULL, in a media release.
Nube is unique in its properties, being ten times fainter yet ten times more extended than other dwarf galaxies with a similar number of stars. Its discovery is akin to finding a hidden treasure in a well-explored attic. Nube is large and yet faint, a ghostly apparition in the universe. To put it into perspective, it's about one-third the size of the Milky Way but has a mass comparable to the Small Magellanic Cloud.
What sets it apart is its significant amount of dark matter, an invisible substance that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it undetectable by traditional telescopes.
Related: Bizarre Galaxy Discovered With Seemingly No Stars Whatsoever
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Monday January 15 2024, @03:09AM (2 children)
And God said, "[Buurrrp -- Whoa! Sorry about that. Ahem.] Let there be light": and there was light.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday January 15 2024, @05:28AM
But with this Galaxy, Alexa didn't understand correctly (maybe because of the burp?), so it stayed dark.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Monday January 15 2024, @06:24AM
It's made entirely of gas, I think it was more likely "Brraaarrrpp!!!", followed by "Oh God, don't light anything!".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday January 15 2024, @03:15AM (7 children)
Obviously, this spiral galaxy is fully inhabited, with a Dyson sphere closure on every star.
No good point in traveling over there.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Monday January 15 2024, @04:28AM (4 children)
I see someone else had the same thought I did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2024, @05:03AM (3 children)
At "270 million light-years away", even a directed pulsed radio or laser signal wouldn't cause humanity any future problems--by then, either we've evolved into something that could defend ourselves, or we're gone.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday January 15 2024, @05:25AM (2 children)
You hold it wrong. If that galaxy is already completed, by Universe scale statistics it may became completed long time ago and now it just emits transgalact colonizers since then.
You don't know how long time they are on their way here already.
They may come tomorrow afternoon.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Funny) by janrinok on Monday January 15 2024, @10:39AM
Oh, not tomorrow afternoon, I already have a full diary. Can they make it the morning after...?
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 17 2024, @01:41PM
Or they might have come 3.8 billion years ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 15 2024, @05:09AM
Unless, of course, you want to see a lot of awesome.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Monday January 15 2024, @01:26PM
... or something large is devouring all the stars. Lets just hope it's not moving in our direction.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ese002 on Monday January 15 2024, @05:54AM (3 children)
Without stars, how are they even seeing this galaxy? Are they seeing light from galaxies on the far side dimmed by passing though the gas galaxy?
(Score: 3, Funny) by EvilSS on Monday January 15 2024, @06:49AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Tuesday January 16 2024, @06:46AM
Obviously, a different article than the one linked here.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2024, @06:55AM
The galaxy contains matter. All matter emits light (blackbody radiation).
It is presumably very cold and dim, which is why the observations were done using a radio telescope.
(Score: 3, Funny) by shrewdsheep on Monday January 15 2024, @02:05PM (1 child)
... we know where all the dark matter lives.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2024, @08:07PM
Well, here, dark lives matter
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday January 16 2024, @04:43PM
Oh, there are stars. It's just that they're made of dark matter, so they're emitting dark energy in the form of dark light. There may also be some dark time involved.