Virgo 1: The Faintest Galaxy Ever Discovered, Yet The Key To Unlocked The Theory Of Galaxy Formation
A team of Riverside scientists, led by University of California, found a large population of distant dwarf galaxies that could reveal important details about a period of star formation in the universe in the distant past.
A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stellar remnants, interstellar gas, bound of stars, dust, and dark matter. Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as spiral, elliptical and irregular.
Astronomers have discovered a new satellite dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way, using data acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope. It could be the dimmest and faintest one ever found and lies in the same direction of the constellation Virgo. The Astrophysical Journal called it Virgo 1. It has an absolute magnitude of -0.8, which makes it very difficult to spot indeed.
The new dwarf galaxy joins a group of approximately 50 satellite galaxies in the Milky Way's neighborhood which is located about 280,000 light-years from the solar system. It was revealed using a 27-foot telescope on the summit of a mountain in Hawaii.
Dwarf galaxies played a significant role during the reionization era in transforming the early universe from being neutral, dark and opaque to ionized, bright and transparent. These incredible massive celestial objects remain elusive and hidden from our plain sight and instruments, even the best telescopes.
If an enormous object like a galaxy happens to be along the direct line of sight of an instrument distant away, the gravity from that object will magnify the light between a distant light source and an observer. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing. Physicists and astronomers are now using it to search for galaxies.
According to a professor at the Astronomical Institute of Tohoku University in Japan, Masashi Chiba, the discovery will give people an important clue to understanding how the Milky Way formed and how dark matter contributed to its formation and how many satellites and what properties they have.
