Scientists have plant what looks like an passing pocket-sized wandflower in orbit around our Milky Way , which had antecedently fend off signal detection .
NamedHydrus 1 , it ’s located about 90,000 short - yr from Earth , between two other satellite of our galaxy – theSmall and big Magellanic Clouds(SMC and LMC ) . It was regain using the Dark Energy Camera ( DECam ) on the Blanco Telescope in Chile .
A paper describing the findings , available onarXiv , has been put in to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for publication . It was lead by Sergey Koposov from Carnegie Mellon University ( CMU ) in Pennsylvania .
“ We describe the discovery of a nearby gnome galax in the constellation of Hydrus , between the Large and the Small Magellanic Clouds , ” the authors wrote in their paper .
Hydrus 1 is a dwarf galaxy , distinguish as being ultra - faint . It ’s only about 326 idle - year across , which is pretty paltry when compare to our Milky Way , which is 100,000 light - years across . It ’s so small that it might actually be a globular cluster , a informal collection of headliner .
It was unwrap within theMagellanic Bridge , a stream of gas that link both the SMC and the LMC . Being found in the Hydrus constellation , which means “ male water snake ” , it was line as a “ snake in the cloud ” .
The researchers found that Hydrus 1 has stars that are comparatively metal - pitiable , which is similar to other suspect dwarf galaxies like this . Galaxies are draw as “ dwarfs ” if they have about 100 million to a few billion maven , much less than the up to 400 billion or so stars in our own beetleweed .
The squad also note that the wandflower is rotating , hold it the “ first rotating extremist - faint dwarf extragalactic nebula ” ever find , they pen in their newspaper . And they also enjoin it was in all probability predominate by dark matter , which may be quite easy to study due to its proximity .
At the moment the connection between Hydrus 1 and the nearby SMC and LMC is n’t quite readable . But it ’s hoped that datum from the Gaia charge , which recently release astunning mapof nearby stars , could give us some vital hint and tell us a bit more about it .
