Peekaboo! A Tiny, Hidden Galaxy Provides a Peek into the Past

December 06, 2022 10:00AM (EST)Release ID: 2022-051
A large bright star is centered, with four long rays extending in an X shape. A small, peanut-shaped blue galaxy appears just to the star's right, between its right-hand rays. The galaxy is speckled with bright spots. The image background is scattered with a few smaller versions of the large central star, and even smaller orange galaxies of various shapes.

Summary

Tucked away in a local pocket of dark matter, a late-blooming dwarf galaxy looks like it belongs in the early universe.

Like someone living apart from modern conveniences, a dwarf galaxy in the local universe looks like it belongs in another time—the early eras of galaxy evolution itself. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has helped confirm an example of what astronomers call an "extremely metal-poor" galaxy, which has very few of the chemical elements or "metals" that stars produce and enrich their galaxies with over time. Most intriguingly, its stars indicate that it is also one of the youngest galaxies ever detected in the local universe. 

Despite the galaxy being nearly hidden behind the glare of a foreground star—leading to its nickname, Peekaboo—Hubble was able to pick out individual stars for analysis. The discovery provides the tantalizing opportunity to study a relic of the past in fine detail, like shaking hands with an ancient ancestor. 

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News releases highlighting the discoveries of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are produced for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, under NASA Contract NAS5-26555. News release content is developed by the News Team in STScI’s Office of Public Outreach.

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