galaxies

How did Andromeda’s dwarf galaxies form? Hubble Telescope finds more questions than answers

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A full image of the dwarf galaxies seen by Hubble; Andromeda is in the center. On the right, some of the dwarf galaxies are seen in boxouts and are enlarged for clarity.

Dozens of dwarf galaxies swarming around the Andromeda Galaxy like bees have been caught on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took more than a thousand orbits of the Earth to take enough images to get a full family portrait of Andromeda’s brightest satellites. The 36 dwarf galaxies are varied in their properties, and … Read more

‘Dark matter is more valuable than gold’: Wobbly galaxies help shine a light on the universe’s strangest stuff

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A diagram shows the proportion of dark matter to

Dark matter, widely known as the universe’s most mysterious stuff, is rarer on Earth than gold — and that’s despite the fact that dark matter outweighs “ordinary matter” by a staggering ratio of five to one. The finding came courtesy of scientists who propose a novel way to map dark matter using the “wobble” of … Read more