[url=http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/article01147-segue-2-dwarf-galaxy.html]Article:[/url]
[quote]Segue 2 is located in the constellation of Aries about 114,000 light-years away. It was discovered in 2009 as part of the massive Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
The galaxy consists of just 1,000 or so stars with a bit of dark matter holding them together. It is also one of the faintest known galaxies with light output just 900 times that of the Sun. That’s miniscule compared to the Milky Way, which shines 20 billion times brighter.
“Finding a galaxy as tiny as Segue 2 is like discovering an elephant smaller than a mouse,” said co-author Dr James Bullock from the University of California Irvine.
“Astronomers have been searching for years for this type of dwarf galaxy, long predicted to be swarming around the Milky Way. Their inability to find any has been a major puzzle, suggesting that perhaps our theoretical understanding of structure formation in the universe was flawed in a serious way.”
“Segue 2’s presence as a satellite of our home galaxy could be a tip-of-the-iceberg observation, with perhaps thousands more very low-mass systems orbiting just beyond our ability to detect them.”
The team determined the upper weight range of 25 of the major stars in the galaxy and found that it weighs at least 10 times less than previously estimated.
Lead author Dr Evan Kirby of the University of California Irvine said: “it’s definitely a galaxy, not a star cluster. The stars are held together by a globule called a dark matter halo. Without this acting as galactic glue, the star body wouldn’t qualify as a galaxy.”
The study also offers tantalizing clues about how iron, carbon and other elements key to human life originally formed.[/quote]
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so basically all that happened is we identified there was a smaller galaxy than the previous smaller galaxy?
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Time to buy bread and water! *hurriedly drives off weeping and sobbing*
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Edited by BADMAGIK: 6/21/2013 6:56:09 PMYour title sucks ass OP. Why didn't you just write, "Possibly the smallest galaxy in our known universe?" WTF is "least massive galaxy?" Lol.
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Huh, this is really cool. What I really want to see is when we're advanced enough in technology. We can colonize different planets, not only in our solar system. But other ones :3
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When you hear about how scientists have been looking for this shit for a while, I can just imagine the look of that one guys face when he discovers it
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Edited by PandaJerk007: 6/22/2013 10:14:24 AMHere's something I found a little odd: [quote]“Astronomers have been searching for years for this type of dwarf galaxy, long predicted to be swarming around the Milky Way. Their inability to find any has been a major puzzle, suggesting that perhaps our theoretical understanding of structure formation in the universe was flawed in a serious way.”[/quote]So they've been expecting a galaxy like this to turn up. And then they go on to compare the galaxy to an elephant that's smaller than a mouse. [quote]“Finding a galaxy as tiny as Segue 2 is like discovering an elephant smaller than a mouse,”[/quote] So in other words, were they saying that they thought their understanding was flawed because they [u]weren't[/u] finding an elephant smaller than a mouse?
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"Least massive" lawl
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[quote]bit of dark matter holding them together[/quote] Wait so is dark matter, like, definitely a thing now? I'm so out of the loop.
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That's a beautiful picture you got there.
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Great thread, please don't ever stop making these.
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I would like to discover an elephant smaller than a mouse now.
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Awww.
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What a wimp.
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How do we know what our own Galaxy looks like?
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I thought ours was the smallest or at least one of them.
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How helpful to humankind. I'm sure this galaxy spawns food for the hungry, right?