Friday, December 26, 2014
Scientists Marvel at Discovery of Nearby Dwarf Galaxy - Pioneer News
Home � Science � Scientists Marvel at Discovery of Nearby Dwarf Galaxy Scientists Marvel at Discovery of Nearby Dwarf Galaxy As NASA (and other private companies) now wok on ways to travel to Mars, it is obvious that space travel has grown immensely in the past sixty years. But even with all of the probes and spacecrafts collecting information on comets and planets, there is still so much more of the Milky Way galaxy that we know absolutely nothing about. Case in point: a team of American and Russian scientists have discovered a dwarf galaxy about 7 million light years away from the Milky Way galaxy. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers based out of the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Karachai-Cherkessia, located the previously unknown �dwarf galaxy.� The �dwarf spherical galaxy,� which they call KKs3, has no spiral arms (like the Milky Way galaxy) and does not have any gas or dust (the stuff needed to make new stars). Scientists believe that, perhaps, these very important elements might have been stripped by larger galaxies nearby or from an earlier star bursts or star formation that might have simply used it all up. What�s more important, though, is that the discovery of this dwarf galaxy lends to the speculation that there are probably more of these that we simply have not discovered yet. �Finding objects like KKs3 is painstaking work, even with observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. But with persistence, we�re slowly building up a map of our local neighborhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought,� explains Dimitry Makarov, one of the Hubble team scientists. �But with persistence, we�re slowly building up a map of our local neighborhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought. It may be that there is a huge number of dwarf spheroidal galaxies out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos.�
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