Shockingly, the tiny galaxies near Andromeda are only the size of the Milky Way
A group of astronomers have discovered the smallest and dimest satellite galaxy bordering the Andromeda galaxy, the closest galaxy in the Milky Way.
The Itsy Bitsy satellite galaxy is called Andromeda XXXV, about 3 million light-years away from the Earth. The discovery of the Milky Way provides astronomers with a useful comparison tool for studying satellite galaxies in the suburbs of our own Milky Way. The team’s findings were published this week in the Astrophysics Journal letter.
“These are fully functional galaxies, but they are about a million as the size of the Milky Way,” said Eric Bell, an astronomer and senior author of the study at the University of Michigan. “It’s like having a very practical person, like a grain of rice.”
Andromeda XXXV’s huge is only about 20,000 times higher than our sun, and is small even for the satellite Milky Way. For comparison, the Milky Way has a mass of about 1.5 trillion solar power, and the beeriest galaxies may reach as high as 300 trillion solar power.
Although it is a mature galaxy, Andromeda XXXV is small enough to be attracted by Andromeda’s gravity, just like the satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Researchers observed Andromeda XXXV using the Hubble Space Telescope.
“This type of galaxy can only revolve around one system, the past Milky Way discovery,” Bell said. “Now, we can look at one around Andromeda, and this is the first time we have done this outside of the system.”
Hubble’s observations show that not only Andromeda xxxv is the Milky Way, but it is small enough to raise questions about how such satellites form stars.
“Most Galaxy satellites have very old star populations. They stopped stars about 10 billion years ago. “What we’re seeing is that similar satellites in Andromeda could form stars billions of years ago, at a distance of 6 billion years.” ”
This discovery can distinguish between satellite galaxy formation and star formation by diverging the Milky Way from other galaxies. There are 100 billion to 200 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, but it is difficult to see such small and weak galaxies, which is why you have heard of Hubble observations about Andromeda XXXV.
There are still distinct questions about the small galaxy – including how it survived the universe, heated nearly 13 billion years ago. “The whole universe turned into a barrel of boiling oil,” Bell said. Andromeda XXXV is so small that it could lose all its gasoline. But for billions of years since then, the Milky Way continues to form stars.
More observations can shed light on the nature of this diligent, durable satellite—through proxy, satellite galaxies that rotate around our own cosmic community can be revealed.
