The weird, faint star system—the tiniest Milky Way satellite ever found—could be under the influence of dark matter.
A collection of stars 30,000 light-years away is the faintest and lowest-mass Milky Way satellite ever found, according to the group of scientists who recently observed it. Oh, and it may be dominated by dark matter, the unknown stuff that makes up about 27% of the universe. It’s a big surprise that this system, sitting on the edge of our galaxy and subject to the gravitational force of its disk, has managed to persist.
” The satellite is called Ursa Major III / UNIONS 1 , and is so named for the constellation it’s in and the survey project that first revealed it. Regardless of its true identity, it’s minuscule, constituted by around 60 10-billion-year-old stars in a region of space about 10 light-years wide. The mass of the entire system is just 16 times that of the Sun. If it is a dwarf galaxy, it’s 15 times smaller than the second-faintest dwarf galaxy that’s known to astronomers.
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