Lonely little dwarf galaxy discovered 7 million light years from Earth

ASTRONOMERS have discovered an isolated dwarf galaxy about seven million light-years away from us, using data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

THE Milky Way’s neighbourhood is a bit more crowded than we thought.

Using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a Russian-American team of astronomers has discovered an isolated dwarf galaxy about seven million light-years away from our galaxy.

Dubbed KKs3, the “dwarf spheroidal” galaxy is located in the southern sky in the direction of the constellation Hydrus. It’s the most recently discovered member of the so-called Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way as well as the Andromeda Galaxy and dozens of other galaxies.

KKsS. Picture: Hubble Space Telescope/D. Makanov

As galaxies go, KKs3 is pretty small. It’s total mass is about one ten-thousandth the mass of the Milky Way, according to the astronomers. And it’s only the second isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxy ever observed in the Local Group. (The first, known as KKR25, was discovered by the same astronomers in 1999.)

“Finding objects like KKs3 is painstaking work, even with observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope,” Prof. Dimitry Makarov, of the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Karachai-Cherkessia, Russia, and one of the members of the team, said.

“But with persistence, we’re slowly building up a map of our local neighbourhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought.

“It may be that are a huge number of dwarf spheroidal galaxies out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos.”

The discovery was described in Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.

The Hubble Space Telescope.

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post and was republished with permission.