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More on Ultra Diffuse Galaxies
from the galactic-fail dept.
The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] reports about research on a galaxy called Dragonfly 44 [arxiv.org] which is believed to contain about the same mass as the Milky Way but is only 1% as bright. The low ratio of luminosity to mass is characteristic of ultra diffuse galaxies [wikipedia.org] (UDG). It is believed to lie 101 Mpc (329 million light years) away. The researchers offer explanations for the dimness of UDGs:
[...] it may be that UDGs are “failed” galaxies that were prevented from building a normal stellar population, because of extreme feedback from supernovae and young stars (Agertz & Kravtsov 2015; Calura et al. 2015), gas stripping (Fujita 2004; Yozin & Bekki 2015), AGN feedback (Reines et al. 2013), or other effects.
"AGN" is short for active galactic nucleus [wikipedia.org], a euphemism for matter falling into a supermassive black hole. The citation is to "Dwarf Galaxies with Optical Signatures of Active Massive Black Holes" [osti.gov] (open access; DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/775/2/116).
previously:
Huge Population of “Ultra-Dark Galaxies” Discovered [soylentnews.org]
