Simulations Suggest Locations of Hidden Orphan Galaxies

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OYour cosmic district can group with hidden galaxies. And if new simulations that suggest the existence of such characteristics are confirmed by real observations, we can better understand how our universe is built and how galaxies are formed in the first place.

A team led by cosmologists from the University of Durham in the United Kingdom has proposed the locations of 80 to 100 small small orphan galaxies which have so far escaped both the detection by telescopes and the previous attempts to use cosmological simulations to identify them. But the researchers used the highest resolution supercomputer, associated with new mathematical modeling approaches, to predict that these clusters of stars can hide near our own Milky Way.

Orphan galaxies have been so difficult to find because, if they exist, they are extremely weak and tiny, formed in the centers of black matter that cosmologists call halos. Something called Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) theory – also known as the standard cosmology model – ready that such galaxies have larger galaxies, such as the Milky Way, recently after the birth of the universe. Over time, the orphan galaxies would have lost a large part of their dark matter and their stellar mass, which makes them low and dark, hidden in the cosmic shadows of their greatest galactic neighbors.

If newly activated telescopes and cameras, such as the instruments hosted at the Vera C. Rubin observatory, can see these dwarf galaxies, orphans for the first time, astronomers could connect certain holes in the LCDM theory left by the inability to detect them.

“We know that the milky path has around sixty confirmed companions satellite galaxies, but we should be dozens of these weak orbit galaxies around the milky path at close distances,” explains the main researcher Isabel Santos-santos, physicist of the University of Durham, in a press release. “If our predictions are correct, this adds more weight to the theory of lambda cold dark matter of the formation and the evolution of the structure in the universe.”

Santos-santos and his colleagues present their results and the image above at the national meeting of astronomy of the Royal Astronomical Society which will be held today at the University of Durham.

Image of lead: the simulation of the Aquarius, the Virgo / Dr Mark Lovell consortium.

• Bob Grant

  Published on July 11, 2025

  Bob Grant is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.