Milky Way has new neighbor, KKs3



by Brooks Hays



Nizhny Arkhyz, Russia (UPI) Dec 23, 2014



The Milky Way galaxy has a new cosmic neighbor -- galaxy KKs3 -- discovered thanks to newly collected data courtesy of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The dwarf spheroidal galaxy lies 700 million miles away and is located in the southern sky in vicinity of the constellation Hydrus. It's only the second known isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxy in the Local Group, a collection of some 54 galaxies that includes both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

With a seemingly never-ending stream of cosmic data for astronomers to parse -- collected by dozens of observatories, on the ground and in the sky -- finding a tiny galaxy amid the noise is not easy. The total mass of KKs3's stars is about one ten-thousandth the total of the Milky Way's material.

"Finding objects like KKs3 is painstaking work, even with observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope," Dimitry Makarov, a researcher at Russia's Special Astrophysical Observatory and the leader of the Russian-American team that discovered the galaxy, said in a recent press release.

"But with persistence, we're slowly building up a map of our local neighborhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought," Makarov added. "It may be that are a huge number of dwarf spheroidal galaxies out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos."

Researchers hope the task of locating other tiny galactic neighbors like KKs3 will become a bit easier when the massive James Webb Space Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope come online in the near future.

The discovery of Makarov and his colleagues was detailed this week in the Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.