United States: Astronomers have found a special group of five tiny galaxies that are close to Earth. These galaxies which are lined up in a straight line, looking like a string of pearls in the sky. The galaxies, named D1 to D5, are held together by their gravity. Some of them are moving in a dance with each other, while others are pulling gas and stars away in a “cosmic tug of war.” It’s an exciting discovery for scientists!
The researchers, who carried out this study, noted these as features that make this dwarf galaxy formation very interesting. The organization may be as demanding as the aesthetic which may present a difficulty for our splendid model in thinking about cosmic evolution.
The dwarf galaxies as seen above are relatively nearby at about 117 million light years from Earth.
These types of galaxies are small, faint and full of gas, but all of them are creating new stars – rather unexpected for dwarf galaxies in a group, European Space Agency quoted University of Seoul led Sabiu as saying. ‘Even more striking, the alignment in the sky is nearly perfect and like can be described as a ‘string of cosmic pearls.”
These galaxies were identified using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which scanned and recorded the distribution, position and relative luminosity of approximately 250 million objects in the sky one-fourth as detailed as over the Earth. We also used data from several other astronomical surveys to help with the discovery process of the team.
This video shows how dwarf galaxies are twirling and sticking together.
Like the name suggests, dwarf galaxies are small-scale, low-density galaxy halos with few stars and correspondingly low luminosity. The total mass of these five dwarf galaxies seems to be approximately 60.2 billion times the mass of the sun. In contrast, our own galaxy, the Milky Way is believed to contain a total mass of roughly 1.5 trillion stars like the sun.
The largest of the five that is referred to as D2 dwarfs measures only 275 million solar masses. The least massive among them, the D4, has a mass of only 14.7 million solar mass. However, when it comes to companionship D1 to D5 are clear outliers despite the fact that they are well fit when compared to other dwarf galaxy parameters.