Hubble Spots Bizarre Galaxy That Appears to Be 99.9 Percent Dark Matter
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The universe is overrun with dark matter, outweighing the ordinary stuff that stars and planets are made of five-to-one. But some corners of the cosmos are more dominated by the invisible substance than others. Using the stalwart Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers have found a galaxy 300 million light away that appears to be made of at least 99.9 percent dark matter — so much that the galaxy is barely visible at all, they report in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The tenebrous realm, dubbed CDG-2, could be one of the most dark matter heavy galaxies ever found, and a compelling candidate for elusive and yet hypothetical “dark galaxies” that astronomers have been searching for for decades, which are thought to contain vanishingly few, if any, stars. “To be technically correct, CDG-2 is an almost-dark galaxy,” explained study lead author Dayi Li, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto, in an interview …









