by Playfuls Staff |
16th January 2007
A British astronomer says at least eight more galaxies have been discovered near Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way, and [more] dozens more are expected to be found.
Daniel Zucker of the University of Cambridge says the discoveries made during the past two years nearly double the number of Milky Way-area galaxies found during the prior 70 years.
"Seven of them are new dwarf galaxies (bound to) the Milky Way, ranging in distance from roughly 100,000 to 700,000 light-years from us," Zucker told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
Zucker said the new dwarf galaxies are extremely faint and diffuse and contain at most a few million stars each, National Geographic News reported. In fact, they are so small he suggests calling them "hobbit galaxies."
In contrast, the Milky Way contains at least 200 billion stars.
The newly detected galaxies were found as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to create a high-resolution map of more than a quarter of the sky. To date, the survey has completed about 80 percent of its goal, NGN reported.
© 2007 UPI
