The Most Crowded Galaxy Discovered : 200 million Stars, only 54 million Light Years Away

Using the combined imaging capabilities of ground-based observatories with the high-flying Hubble Space Telescope and its cousin, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the ultra-compact dwarf galaxy known as M60-UCD1 turns out to be 15,000 times denser than what is found in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

“Traveling from one star to another would be a lot easier in M60-UCD1 than it is in our galaxy, but it would still take hundreds of years using present technology,” said lead author of the new study, astronomer Michigan State University’s Jay Strader, in a press release.

What’s even more remarkable about M60-USD1 is that the galaxy’s most crowded part–its core, where half its 200 million solar masses resides–spans a radius of only 80 light years. That means the stars in this little galaxy are about 25 times closer to each other than those we find around the Sun’s galactic neighborhood.

Chandra observations have revealed that the galaxy’s tiny core harbors a strong x-ray source, which belongs to a giant black hole that weighs 10 million times the mass of our sun. That makes it about twice the size of the black hole in our own galaxy.

Astronomers theorize that a close encounter with a neighboring galaxy billions of years ago may have ripped away stars from M60-USD1 and may have led to the supermassive black hole pulling in the surviving stars close together.

“We think nearly all of the stars have been pulled away from the exterior of what once was a much bigger galaxy,” said co-author Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University in Australia in the press release.

“This leaves behind just the very dense nucleus of the former galaxy, and an overly massive black hole.”

Shared From National Geographic

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- Unknown Updated at: Thursday, September 26, 2013