Hubble telescope spots ‘failed’ starless galaxy known as Cloud 9
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is examining a newly discovered cloud of gas and dark matter that may represent a long-predicted but never-before-observed “failed” galaxy
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Astronomers say they have identified a new type of astronomical object that challenges traditional ideas about how galaxies form.
Using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, scientists studied a cloud of gas nicknamed Cloud-9. Located near the spiral galaxy Messier 94, about 14 million light-years from Earth, the object contains no stars, making it nearly invisible in optical light.
“This is a tale of a failed galaxy,” said principal investigator Alejandro Benitez-Llambay of the University of Milano-Bicocca. “The absence of stars is exactly what proves the theory right. It tells us that we have found a primordial object that hasn’t yet — or may never — lit up the cosmos with starlight.”
This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 14 million light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission, which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, VLA, Gagandeep Anand (STScI), Alejandro Benitez-Llambay (University of Milano-Bicocca); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Hubble observations reveal a faint, ghostly concentration of gas. Astronomers say the cloud is also dominated by dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up much of the universe’s mass. Together, these characteristics provide strong evidence for an object long predicted by scientists known as a Reionization-Limited H I Cloud, or RELHIC.
According to NASA, in the early universe, some dark matter halos were able to gather gas but failed to trigger star formation. Those conditions left behind rare, starless relics that have remained largely undetected until now.
The discovery of Cloud-9 confirms a key prediction of cosmological models and offers a rare glimpse into how galaxies begin or, in this case, how they fail to begin, their lives.
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