Bizarre Galaxy Discovered With Seemingly No Stars Whatsoever [View all]

11 January 2024
By MICHELLE STARR





A newly discovered object is stretching our understanding of what constitutes a galaxy.

Called J0613+52, this massive blob of something some 270 million light-years away appears to have no stars whatsoever. At least, none that can be seen. It's just a haze made of the kind of gas that's found between stars in normal galaxies, drifting around by its lone self like an absolute badass.

Its mass and motion appear to be normal for what we'd expect of a spiral galaxy… in fact, if you extracted the stars from a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way or Andromeda, J0613+52 is pretty much what you'd end up with.

According to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O'Neil of the Green Bank Observatory, it could be the first discovery of a primordial galaxy in the nearby Universe – a galaxy made up mostly of the gas that formed at the beginning of time.

- click for image -

http://tinyurl.com/4j8kx98c

The region of space where J0613+52 can be found. (O'Neil et al.)

The discovery – one made purely by chance – has been presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

https://www.sciencealert.com/bizarre-galaxy-discovered-with-seemingly-no-stars-whatsoever