In almost 300,000 light-years away, a faint group of stars that could hold clues to the secrets of hundreds of other unseen galaxies. With the use of an eight meter telescope, equipped with a new and larger-diameter perched on the summit of a mountain in Hawaii, a team of astronomers led by researchers from Tohoku University have recently discovered a faint dwarf galaxy that lurks around our very own Milky Way. Experts believe that the discovery of this so-called ghost galaxy could potentially lead to the discovery of the existence of many more in our neighboring galaxies.
The Ghost Galaxy And It's Features
With an optical waveband magnitude of -0.8, the newly discovered ghost galaxy is believed to be the faintest one to have ever been found yet. According to The Sun, astronomers have named it Virgo 1 due to the fact that it lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo. It was found that the new dwarf galaxy is located about 280,000 light-years from our solar system and joins a group of approximately 50 observable satellite galaxies in the Milky Way's neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the discovery of Virgo 1 was allegedly reported earlier this week in a new study in The Astrophysical journal and potentially classified as an information that could help astrophysicists to better find and characterize the elusive dark matter.
Furthermore, as per Daily Mail, a team from the University of Portsmouth has mapped the positions of cosmic voids and super clusters, using more than three quarters of a million galaxies. However, the new discovery suggests there could be a large number of yet-undetected dwarf satellites in the halo of the Milky Way.
As of the present time, in the quest to better understand the dark matter, which is considered as the mysterious substance that makes up about 80 per cent of the universe, it was found that astronomers look to the edges of the Galaxy. Experts believe that the more faint satellites are being discovered on these locations, the more we can infer about the process by which dark matter in itself is able to be assembled and behave.
