Shadowy Galaxies Around The Milky Way
We know our galaxy is not the only one in the Universe. But just how many are there?
Image by Lumina Obscura from Pixabay
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For a long time, we know that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy in our part of the Universe. As it is the case for many other spiral galaxies “a pack” of smaller galaxies accompany it in close proximity. So far, we detected about sixty of them.
The largest among these is the irregular dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud that has a total mass of just a single percent of the Milky Way. It is about one hundred and sixty-three thousand light-years away from the Milky Way and it is full of dust and gas thus many new stars are being born there.
Ethan Nadler and his colleagues from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and from Stanford University recently analyzed a model of creation and evolution of galaxies in our neighborhood that is based on what we know about dark matter. The researchers concluded that we should discover about a hundred or even more small and very dim galaxies
The Key Was The Large Magellanic Cloud
The scientists ran sophisticated simulations of how galaxies get created and evolve. To make them as precise as possible they included all known knowledge about dark matter. A key role in their simulations was played by the Large Magellanic Cloud and knowledge that the Milky Way “stole” six satellite galaxies from the dwarf galaxy.
The scenario seems to indicate that the Large Magellanic Cloud came very close to the Milky Way about 2.2 billion years ago. And from that information, the researchers induced how many small galaxies we should find near to the Milky Way.
Astronomers are actually currently capable of observing incredibly small galaxies. They require them to have a total stellar mass of just of a few hundred Suns. The results of the research seem to indicate that there should be even extremely small micro-galaxies with a hundred times less stellar mass.
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