According to Universe Today, The Nube galaxy is so faint that the famous Sloan Deep Sky Survey (SDSS) project missed it. However, scientists were lucky when another survey program called the IAC Stripe82 Heritage Project accidentally saw it, an almost transparent object.
The research team led by Dr. Mireia Montes from the Institute of Astrophysics of Canarias (IAC - Spain) analyzed and confirmed that Nube is mainly made of dark matter.
The Nube galaxy is marked by a solid black square in the overall observation, only looming in more detailed observations (Photo: Montes et al)
This “evil galaxy” is a “nearly dark” dwarf galaxy, about the same mass as the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way galaxy whose planet we belong.
The results come from additional observations using the Green Bank Telescope (located in the US), showing that the "evil galaxy" is about 350 million light years away from us.
It is an extremely diffuse galaxy, 26 billion times more massive than the Sun but its total stellar mass is only 390 million times that of the Sun, suggesting something dark, invisible is taking hold.
That invisible thing is dark matter, a hypothetical type of matter that is believed to occupy most of the universe, even surrounding the Earth without us being able to see or feel it.
Half of Nube's mass is spread across 22.000 light-years of space and is the largest ultra-diffuse galaxy known to scientists.
According to the authors, research on the "evil galaxy" Nube will be a great opportunity for scientists to answer questions about dark matter.
At the same time, it brings hope that there are many dwarf galaxies like "ghost galaxies" like that, we just haven't noticed or seen them because they are too dim and almost transparent like a ghost. .
(Source: Nguoi Lao Dong Newspaper)
