IAU Commission X1

NASA’s Hubble Identifies One of Darkest Known Galaxies

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have identified an exceptionally faint galaxy, known as Candidate Dark Galaxy-2 (CDG-2), that appears to be nearly invisible except for a few surrounding globular star clusters. By combining Hubble’s sharp imaging with data from ESA’s Euclid and the Subaru Telescope, researchers confirmed the presence of a diffuse glow indicating an underlying galaxy that is overwhelmingly dominated by dark matter, making it one of the darkest known galaxies ever discovered. This finding, enabled by advanced statistical techniques to detect faint structures, offers new insights into the hidden population of dark matter-rich galaxies in the nearby universe.

An International Team of Astronomers Led by Umass Amherst May Have Just Found One of the Missing Links in Galaxy Evolution

An international team of astronomers has uncovered a previously unknown population of dusty, star-forming galaxies that existed just about one billion years after the Big Bang. These ancient galaxies, identified through a combination of ALMA’s submillimeter data and James Webb Space Telescope observations, may represent a “missing link” in the evolutionary sequence between ultrabright early galaxies and much older quiescent ones, challenging current models of how galaxies formed and evolved in the early universe.