Dark Galaxies

Till now it was all in books that there are “dark galaxies” in the universe, gas-rich clusters that don’t have any stars.

Recently using ESO’s Very Large Telescope first time the dark galaxies have been directly observed. Since they’re devoid of stars, very little light is emitted from the galaxies, although they’ve been spotted by the illumination of nearby quasars.

Sebastiano Cantalupo, the lead author behind the study from the University of California, says the plan eventually reaped rewards: “After several years of attempts to detect fluorescent emission from dark galaxies, our results demonstrate the potential of our method to discover and study these fascinating and previously invisible objects.”

-CB