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Hubble Reveals a Previously Unknown Dwarf Galaxy Just 7 Million Light Years Away

Posted by timothy on from the hey-neighbor dept.

The L.A. Times reports that the Hubble Space Telescope's ongoing survey work has discovered a dwarf universe a mere 7 million light years away: While only just recently discovered using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, the galaxy known as KKs3 has been around for a long while. Astronomers led by Igor Karachentsev of the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Karachai-Cherkessia, Russia, showed that some 74% of KKs3’s star mass was formed in the universe’s early years, at least 12 billion years ago. Most of the tiny galaxy’s stars are old and dim, making it a fascinating fossil that could help astronomers understand what ancient galactic environments looked like.

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Missing information by mrsquid0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    RA = 02:24:44.4
    Dec = 73:30:51

    Unfortunately it is a bit too far south to see from Canada.

    --
    Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
  2. Re:Missing information by phozz+bare · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thanks. I was going to inquire about the difficulty of seeing Cassiopeia from Canada, when I found (thanks Wikipedia!) that you had missed the negative sign in the Declination... anyway, apparently this object is located in the constellation Hydrus near the celestial south pole. Why this was so difficult to write in the summary or the linked article is beyond me.

  3. Re:Dwarf Universe? by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Earh is 50 kiloparsecs from the Large Magellic Cloud, 778 kiloParsecs from the Andromeda Galaxy. And 2 Megaparsecs from this newly discovered galaxy. Apparently. KKs is an isolated spheroidal galaxy-- not a satellite of the Milky way, Andromeda or even Triangulum, nor is it clustered with other dwarf galaxies in the local group.
    The paper says

    Since 2008, only three galaxies had been newly discovered in a spherical shell between radii 1 and 3Mpc around the Local Group. Two of them are dIrrs, UGC 4879 (Kopylov et al. 2008) and Leo P (Giovanelli et al. 2013), and the third one, KK 258 (Karachentsev et al. 2014), belongs to the transition type dTr with minimal but detectable gas and young stars. Here we report the discovery in this volume of a dwarf spheroidal system KKs 3 ([KK2000] 03 = SGC 0224.3–7345 in the nomencla- ture of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database) at a distance of D = 2.12 ± 0.07 Mpc and well removed from any other known galaxy.

    So the interesting feature isn't that it's close. It's that it's distant from any galaxy.

  4. Old news is old by Tom+Womack · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not quite sure why the LA Times is reporting this today, when the galaxy was discovered in 2000 and the preprint of the paper describing the age determination using Hubble data ( arXiv:1411.1674 ) appeared in the Arxiv in November.