Photo has been used for illustrative purposes.

Gulf Today Report

Using the European Space Agency's Gaia Observatory, an international team of astrophysicists at the University of Laguna and the Space Telescope Science Institute in the USA discovered three hard-to-observe dwarf spherical galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

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Dwarf galaxies attract a special interest from scientists because they were the first to form, and not many of them are left because they were destroyed by large galaxies such as the Milky Way.

So, scientists are interested in studying them due to the important information they contain about the early universe, and because they contain large amounts of dark matter and little gas.

Previous studies proved that that dwarf spherical objects do not have internal rotation patterns, but their stars move in mostly random orbits towards and away from the centre of the galaxy, and therefore scientists will conduct their study to understand the history of these dwarf galaxies.

Last month, astronomers have always been curious to know about the young and old stars that exist in the 13.1 billion-year-old Milky Way — the galaxy that houses the Earth and its solar system and appears as a whitish band in the clear summer night sky.

A team of astronomers of the European Union-funded “Asterochronometry” project had so far successfully studied and surveyed 100 of the 400 billion stars oscillating within the whitish band.  Interviewed, principal investigator Dr. Andrea Miglio said the 100 selected stars were “red giant branch stars (whose iron content is four to 50 times less than in the sun), which is a good indicator of an old population. The final sample contains only 95, with ages from two to 16 billion years.”