thenewenlightenmentage:Dwarf Galaxies “Challenge Our Understanding of How the Universe Works”“

thenewenlightenmentage:Dwarf Galaxies “Challenge Our Understanding of How the Universe Works”“Early in 2013 we announced our startling discovery that half of the dwarf galaxies surrounding theAndromeda Galaxy are orbiting it in an immense plane,” said Geraint Lewis, of the University of Sydney’s School of Physics. “This plane is more than a million light years in diameter, but is very thin, with a width of only 300 000 light years. Everywhere we looked we saw this strangely coherent coordinated motion of dwarf galaxies. From this we can extrapolate that these circular planes of dancing dwarfs are universal, seen in about 50 percent of galaxies,” Lewis added. “This is a big problem that contradicts our standard cosmological models. It challenges our understanding of how the universe works including the nature of dark matter.”"Astronomers have been observing Andromeda since Persian astronomers first noted it over a thousand years ago, but it is only in the past decade that we have truly studied it in exquisite detail with the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey,” said Lewis. “The Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey – cutely called PAndAS – is a large project that ran between 2008 and 2011, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope situated on the Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. Now that we’re examining the data it collected, it is providing our first panoramic view of our closest large companion in the cosmos,” explained Lewis.Continue Reading -- source link
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