NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) Astronomers at Carnegie Mellon University have just discovered a tiny dwarf galaxy orbiting our solar system, which had somehow managed to avoid detection until now. Pretty sneaky, if you ask us! Here’s more from Alphr.com: _Visible from Earth’s southern hemisphere, roughly 90,000 lightyears away from the sun, the researchers explain Hydrus 1 is a faint, mildly elliptical galaxy that stretches only about 326 lightyears across. By comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 lightyears across.
“Hydrus 1’s velocity dispersion indicates the system is dark matter dominated, but its dynamical mass-to-light ratio is significantly smaller than typical for ultra-faint dwarfs at similar luminosity,” the researchers wrote in the paper. With these parameters identified, the researchers suggest Hydrus 1 is likely a dwarf galaxy. The metal-poor nature of the stars in Hydrus 1 also points to this conclusion. However, there is a chance it could be a “globular” cluster of old stars. _ The Blanco Telescope is named after Puerto Rican astronomer Victor M. Blanco and is located at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Northern Chile. The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) came online in 2012 and has been described by Fermilabs as the “most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created.”
DarkEnergySurvey.org It’s all part of the Dark Energy Survey whose mission is to “help us understand why the expansion of the unviverse is accelerating, rather than slowing due to gravity,” according to Fermilab scientist and project manager Brenna Flaugher. To learn more about the Dark Energy Survey, you can check out there website at DarkEnergySurvey.org.