Researchers managed to find a new weak dwarf spheroidal galaxy. She was spotted in a Subaru telescope in Hawaii. d1005 + 68 is a member of the M81 group.
The dwarf type is a small galaxy with 100 million - several billion stars. For scientists, such objects are quite problematic, since they bring chaos into evolutionary models of the distribution of matter in the Universe. Dark matter indicators clearly indicate that dwarf galaxies should be more common.
Insertion of M81 star-halo map with allowed stars. The colors correspond to the metallicity cells. All known galaxies are marked. d1005 + 68 is located on the bottom left (black arrow) To fill in the gaps, scientists have to look for the missing “dwarfs,” especially outside the Local Group. Recently, astronomers decided to study the extended halo M81 and noticed a dense stellar region, which turned out to be a dwarf galaxy.
It is 13 million light-years away and 250,000 light-years from M81. The radius extends to 613 light-years, and by the stellar mass reaches 250000 solar. Age - 12 billion years.
Interestingly, this is one of the weakest galaxies found outside the Local Group. Also surprising is the proximity to the dwarf elliptical galaxy BK5N. They are separated by only 16,300 light years of space. There are suggestions that d1005 + 68 is its companion.
