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Starts With A Bang podcast #115 — Dwarf galaxies in isolation
The tiniest galaxies of all are the most susceptible to violence by their larger, bullying siblings. That’s why we need them in isolation.
Ethan Siegel
Starts With A Bang!
Ethan Siegel
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Starts With A Bang!
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Sure, it’s easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe’s stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, the overwhelming majority of galaxies are much smaller and lower in mass than we and our cousins are. These low-mass galaxies, the dwarf galaxies in the Universe, represent upwards of 97% of all the galaxies that exist.
However, while most of the dwarf galaxies we know of are found as satellites around larger, more massive galaxies, they aren’t good laboratories for helping us understand the Universe as it was long ago. Back during the first few billion years of cosmic history, it wasn’t just dwarf galaxies that formed the majority of starlight in the cosmos, but isolated dwarf galaxies: dwarf…