Astronomers using the NASA and European Space Agency’s Hubble Space Telescope have identified what appears to be a long-predicted but never before confirmed cosmic object: a gas-rich cloud dominated by dark matter that contains no stars. The object, known as Cloud-9, sits near the spiral galaxy Messier 94 and offers rare, direct evidence of a “failed galaxy,” a structure that began forming billions of years ago but never completed the process. The research was led by Alejandro Benitez-Llambay of Milano-Bicocca University in Milan, Italy, with major contributions from scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and combine deep optical observations from Hubble with earlier radio detections from some of the world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes. “This is a tale of a failed galaxy,” Benitez-Llambay said. “In science, we usually learn more from the failures than from the successes. In this case, seeing no stars is what proves the theory right. It tells us that we have found in the local Universe a primordial building …