Skywatcher Giuseppe Donatiello
spotted an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, now dubbed Pegasus V, in archival data from a U.S. Department of Energy camera
Intrigued astronomers who
studied the region now think that Pegasus V might be a "fossil" of the first galaxies, packed with very old stars.
The Galaxy was first detected
in data gathered by the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
If future searches turn up
relatively empty this would imply a serious problem with astronomers' understanding of cosmology and dark matter
Dark matter is believed
to make up much of the underlying structure of the universe, but astronomers' challenge in seeking it
NASA's James Webb Space
Telescope will shed more light on early galaxies when that deep-space observatory completes commissioning in mid-July.