Astronomy Picture Of The Day: "Cloud-9."

 

#NASA, #Space, #astronomy, #διάστημα

Black Hole@konstructivizm

Researchers claim to have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to discover an entirely new type of celestial object: dubbed "Cloud-9." Cloud-9 is a galaxy that failed to form about 14,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers refer to it as a Reionization-Limited "H I" (referring to neutral hydrogen) Cloud, or "RELHIC.” Cloud-9's serendipitous moniker, which shares wording with an idiom about being extremely happy, is – well – a happy accident. The object's name simply derives from the fact that it is the ninth gas cloud identified on the outskirts of a nearby spiral galaxy, Messier 94. Turns out, even its scientific name of RELHIC isn't too far off, as Cloud-9 is quite literally a relic of the early universe. While scientists have observed hydrogen clouds before, Cloud-9 is thought to have originated in the universe's early days – what NASA described as "a fossil leftover that has not formed stars." “This is a tale of a failed galaxy,” said Milano-Bicocca University physics assistant professor Alejandro Benitez-Llambay, coauthor of a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, in an ESA statement. “In science, we usually learn more from the failures than from the successes,” he added. “In this case, seeing no stars is what proves the theory right. It tells us that we have found in the local Universe a primordial building block of a galaxy that hasn’t formed.” The discovery could also allow us to better understand dark matter, the researchers argue.