When we think of cosmology, we often imagine the largest telescopes peering into the deepest space, collecting the feeble light from exploding stars or the first galaxies.
But for some cosmologists—like the galactic archaeologists—the focus is the local universe, asking if we can learn about the evolution of our own Milky Way from what we see around us.
While this local universe is, well, local, how little we know about it can come as quite a surprise; we simply haven’t scanned the immensity of the entire sky in enough detail to reveal its secrets. But new surveys with new telescopes are opening up the sky, and what they are revealing is quite surprising.
Our New Cosmic Friends
So, what have they discovered?
Two new papers appeared just this month—one from a team based in the United States and another by an independent group in the U.K.—announcing the discovery of new “dwarfs“ of the southern sky, small galaxies with only a few hundreds of millions of stars. (Our Milky Way is thought to have several hundred billion stars.)
In fact, both papers presented the discovery of the same eight dwarf galaxies, with the British team identifying potentially one more.
