For the first time in a decade, astronomers have found new dwarf galaxies — nine, with just billions of stars or even less, compared with the hundreds of billions in our own — orbiting the Milky Way. That’s the most that have ever turned up at once. The findings were published Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal.
The new dwarfs are a billion times dimmer than the Milky Way and a million times less massive, the researchers who discovered them report. They were found near the Large and Small Magellanic Cloud, which are the two biggest dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
Unlike larger galaxies bursting with stars, dwarf galaxies have way more dark matter than normal matter. So for astronomers studying dark matter, they’re basically an all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Dwarf satellites are the final frontier for testing our theories of dark matter,” Vasily Belokurov of the Institute of Astronomy, one of the study’s co-authors, said.
