Astronomers discovered dwarf galaxy orbiting Milky Way
A team of scientists from Cambridge University has discovered the fainted dwarf satellite galaxies ever found orbiting our own Milky way galaxy.there are almost 50 galaxies orbiting milky way.about 40 of them are already faint and diffused.
Smaller galaxies usually orbit larger galaxies like Milky Way, similar to way Moon orbits Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun. This happens due to the gravity .In the case of galaxies, however, an unseen force called dark matter is also believed to be acting upon the satellite galaxies. scientists have named the faintest dwarf galaxy, Virgo-1. It lies in the constellation of Virgo which is 284,000 light years away from us.
Until now, the faintest galaxy Segue-1 has the absolute magnitude in the V band was -1.5 in optical waveband. But surprisingly Virgo 1 has an absolute magnitude of V band is -0.8. The photometric data from the analysis identifies that it really is a solar system, not a globular cluster.
Virgo-1 was detected at Hawaii Subaru observatory, which is specially equipped with 8.2-meter optical-infrared telescope, manufactured and controlled by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Having the large aperture and monolithic primary mirror, it can take in a lot more lights than other telescopes.
"This discovery implies hundreds of faint dwarf satellites waiting to be discovered in the halo of the Milky Way," said lead researcher Dr. Masashi Chiba, from Tohoku University.
The team is now going to explore more faint galaxies like these, using the Subaru telescope. The Subaru telescope is an advanced tool like Hyper Supreme-Cam (HSC) technology can help us to search how many galaxies are indeed there and what properties they have. This will perform a bigger role of understanding what happened at the beginning of time, how universe works, how galaxies were made and how dark matter contributed to it.
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