A shockingly tiny galaxy near Andromeda is only one million with the size of the Milky Way

A group of astronomers has found the smallest, the most lace -bearing satellite galaxy bordering on the closest galactic neighbor of the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Itsy-Bitsy satellite galaxy carries called Andromeda XXXV and is located about 3 million light-years from Earth. The discovery of the galaxy gives astronomers a useful comparative tool for the study of satellite galaxies on the outskirts of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The team’s findings were published This week in letters for astrophysical magazines.

“These are fully functional galaxies, but they are about million of the size of the Milky Way,” says Eric Bell, an astronomer at the University of Michigan and a senior author of the study, at a university releaseS “It’s like having a perfect functional human being that is the size of grain rice.”

Andromeda XXXV is only about 20,000 times more massive than our sun – very little, even for a satellite galaxy. For comparison, the mass of the Milky Way is approximately 1.5 trillion solar tables, And the most pop -up galaxies can be up to 30 trillion solar tables.

Although it is a complete galaxy, Andromeda XXXV is small enough to be struck by the gravitational pull of Andromeda-many like satellite galaxies on the Milky Way. The researchers watched Andromeda XXXV with the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This type of galaxy was discovered only around one system, the Milky Way, in the past,” Bell said. “We are now able to look at one around Andromeda and this is the first time we have done it outside our system.”

Hubble’s observations have revealed that not only Andromeda XXXV satellite galaxy, but is small enough to raise questions about how such satellites even form stars.

“Most of the Milky Road satellites have many ancient star populations. They stopped forming stars about 10 billion years ago, “says Marco Arias, a leading author of the study, in the same edition. “What we see is that such satellites in Andromeda can form stars until a few billion years ago – about 6 billion years.”

The find is usable in differentiating the formation of a satellite galaxy and the formation of stars along the Milky Way from the conditions in other galaxies. There is somewhere between 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies In the observable universe, but such small, weak galaxies are difficult to consider – which is why you hear about Hubble’s observations of Andromeda XXXV.

There are still exceptional questions about the small galaxy – including how it survives the universe that warms up nearly 13 billion years ago. “The whole universe has become a boiling oil bath,” Bell said, and Andromeda XXXV is so small that it could lose all its gas. But for several billion years later, the galaxy continued to form stars.

More observations could clarify the nature of this hardworking, permanent satellite – and through a proxy could shed light on the satellite galaxies that rotate around the periphery of our own space neighborhood.