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.
“We think we have a new kind of object,” says Bryn Jones, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a member of the team which discovered seven such “ultra-compact dwarf galaxies”. 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…
