A NEW type of dwarf galaxy has been discovered. From ground-based telescopes, these bright, distant objects look like stars, but pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope show they are in fact galaxies unlike any seen before.
鈥淲e think we have a new kind of object,鈥� says Bryn Jones, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a member of the team which discovered seven such 鈥渦ltra-compact dwarf galaxies鈥�. The galaxies are in the Fornax cluster of more than 300 galaxies around 60 million light years away.
The ultra-compact dwarf galaxies may be the remnants of other, less exotic dwarf galaxies whose outer stars have been stripped away by the gravitational pull of their heavier neighbours (Nature, vol 423, p 519).
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