A galaxy that appears to have no stars was recently discovered for the first time.
Astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, US, announced that they had discovered this galaxy by chance while observing around 350 dimly lit galaxies using radio telescopes around the world. The researchers named this galaxy, located 270 million light-years away, “J0613+52” and announced it at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 8.
Illustration depicting the hydrogen cloud observed in the galaxy “J0613+52”. Red is the far side, blue is the near side gas cloud. Source = Green Bank Observatory
It was analyzed that “J0613+52” consisted of gas only. No stars have been observed in this galaxy, where the amount of gas is estimated to be 2 billion times the mass of the Sun. The absence of stars and only gas is a feature observed in primordial galaxies at the start of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Considering that more than 13.8 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, this is a truly unusual case.
The researchers hypothesized that the reason for the lack of stars was because the gas was so dispersed that the gravitational force that creates stars didn’t work, or because there were no nearby galaxies to support star formation.
The researchers said that if it is eventually confirmed that this galaxy is composed only of primordial gas before star formation, this discovery could be the first case of discovering a primordial galaxy before stars formed in the nearby universe.
Around the same time, Spanish astronomers led by Dr. Mireia Montes discovered another galaxy with few stars called “Nube” (which means cloud in Spanish) and published it in the international academic journal “Astronomy and Astrophysics”. “With our current knowledge, we cannot understand how a galaxy with such extreme properties could exist,” Montes said in a statement.
The New York Times on invisible matter and energy
Citing the precedent of the names “dark matter” and “dark energy”, he suggested that galaxies in which stars cannot be identified, such as the newly discovered galaxy, could be called “dark galaxies”. Furthermore, it is reported that the frequent appearance of dark galaxies means that the theory of galaxy formation and evolution, which humanity has long believed in, has been called into question.
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