Lightest known galaxy is equivalent of mouse-sized elephant, scientist says
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Elizabeth Barber Contributor
Far, far away, at the Milky Way鈥檚 outer skirts, is a galaxy home to just 1,000 stars, all held together with dark matter, our galactic glue.
It鈥檚 a little galaxy, but this backwater collection of stars is big news to scientists: it is the lightest dwarf galaxy ever discovered, so incongruously tiny that University of California, Irvine cosmologist James Bullock, co-author of the paper published today in , likened it to 鈥渄iscovering an elephant smaller than a mouse.鈥�
Scientists have long theorized that the outer Milky Way is packed with lightweight galaxies, but until this newly measured galaxy, called Segue 2, they had been unable to find any examples. Possibly, such small galaxies were too faint, eluding the detection of our earthly equipment. Alternatively, they didn鈥檛 exist at all, and 鈥減erhaps our theoretical understanding of structure formation in the universe was flawed in a serious way,鈥� Bullock said,
When it was first discovered in 2009, scientists thought Segue 2 was significantly more massive than it is now believed to be. But using data from the Keck telescopes, on the summit of Hawaii鈥檚 Mauna Kea, scientists have now determined it is at least ten times less than the previously estimated mass.
Segue 2 is also one of the universe鈥檚 faintest known galaxies, with a light output just 900 times that of the sun 鈥� puny, relative to the Milky Way, which is 20 billion times brighter than that. And this featherweight galaxy differs from a star cluster in that it has structure, its stars are bound together with dark matter.
It鈥檚 still possible that Segue 2 is a teeny anomaly in our galactic neighborhood鈥檚 outer boroughs. But it also could be "a tip-of-the-iceberg observation, with perhaps thousands more very low-mass systems orbiting just beyond our ability to detect them," Bullock said, .
That's thousands of mouse-sized elephants out there waiting to be discovered.
