{"id":509079,"date":"2026-03-02T08:13:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T08:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/509079\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T08:13:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T08:13:13","slug":"canada-led-team-discovers-ghost-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/509079\/","title":{"rendered":"Canada-led team discovers ‘ghost galaxy’"},"content":{"rendered":"

How do you uncover something deep in space that can\u2019t really be seen? A Canadian-led team has not only done that \u2013 they\u2019ve identified an entire galaxy that\u2019s almost completely invisible and a reminder that there\u2019s a lot about the universe astronomers still don\u2019t understand. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s called a \u201cdark galaxy.\u201d It lies roughly 250 million light-years away and is thought to be mostly made up of mysterious dark matter, meaning it emits nearly no light. Just a scattering of stars can be seen in what appears to be a faint smudge deep the night sky. <\/p>\n

\u201cYeah it\u2019s pretty much invisible,\u201d said David Li, the University of Toronto post-doctoral fellow who\u2019s been fielding lots of interview requests about his team\u2019s discovery that\u2019s also been nicknamed a \u201cghost galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Dark matter in the universe Four globular clusters of stars can been around a suspected dark galaxy. (SOURCE: NASA, ESA , D. Li (UToronto) Image Processing : J. DePasquale (STScl)) <\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s cool. Because they\u2019re essentially extremely dark and they\u2019re very special,\u201d said Li. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to find them.\u201d <\/p>\n

NASA recently promoted the research along with the Hubble Space Telescope which was used to help find CDG-2, short for Candidate Dark Galaxy-2. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis thing is too extreme,\u201d said Li, referring to the possibility that it is 99.9 per cent made up of dark matter. <\/p>\n

Since dark galaxies are so difficult to see, researchers had to come up with an indirect way to find them. They instead searched for globular clusters \u2013 tightly packed groups of very old stars that typically orbit a galaxy. <\/p>\n

They noticed four of them in a small patch of space that appeared to be empty and realized something must be holding them together \u2013 something massive and almost completely invisible. That hidden force is believed to be CDG\u20112. <\/p>\n

\"\"James Webb telescope image This image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows just some of the billions of galaxies in the universe. Estimates vary from 100 billion to 2 trillion. <\/p>\n

To reach their conclusion the team, including collaborators at McMaster, the University of Waterloo and international scientists combined data and imagery from three of astronomy\u2019s most powerful instruments: NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency\u2019s Euclid space telescope and the ground\u2011based Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.<\/p>\n

They detected a very faint glow and diffuse structure around the clusters \u2013 clear signs that a hidden galaxy may be there. The researchers say CDG-2 only has the brightness of about 5 million stars, a tiny number compared to the 100 to 400 billion in our own Milky Way. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re very different from what we know about normal galaxies,\u201d said Li. <\/p>\n

The researchers think long\u2011ago encounters with larger neighbouring galaxies tore away the material CDG\u20112 needed to make stars, leaving it almost entirely dark. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why I\u2019d call it a ghost,\u201d Li said. \u201cOnly a skeleton of what it once was remains.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Dark matter in the universe M15 is a globular cluster in the Milky Way\u2019s halo that contains more than 100,000 stars (SOURCE: ESA, NASA) <\/p>\n

Li is part of the growing field of astrostatistics, which uses statistical tools to comb through the massive flood of data from today\u2019s telescopes and uncover hidden patterns.<\/p>\n

Scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of dark matter for a century \u2013 ever since it was first proposed in 1933. NASA calls it the invisible glue that holds the universe together, a substance that neither reflects, emits or absorbs light. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s believed 80 per cent of all matter in the universe is dark matter. Scientists think it exists because it appears to be having a gravitational influence on visible matter. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe can observe its effect,\u201d says Li. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s already been a busy year for Canadian astronomers studying galaxies. Earlier this month, astrophysicists from the University of Waterloo observed the most distant \u201cjellyfish galaxy\u201d ever imaged \u2013 a galaxy trailing long tails of gas that resemble jellyfish tentacles. <\/p>\n

\"\"Jellyfish galaxy Distant jellyfish galaxy discovered by University of Waterloo astronomers. (SOURCE: JWST, I. Roberts (UWaterloo) <\/p>\n

In January, researchers primarily from Dalhousie University and UBC also found something surprising: a cluster of galaxies with scorching hot gas that existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, far earlier and hotter than current models had predicted. <\/p>\n

As for Li\u2019s discovery, he\u2019s been surprised by all of the global attention he\u2019s been getting. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a little bit crazy,\u201d Li said. \u201cBut it feels great that people actually care about science and astronomy in particular.\u201d <\/p>\n

He hopes to find more dark galaxies because he believes they could unlock new clues about the nature of dark matter. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe thousands, or tens of thousands of them, could show up in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you uncover something deep in space that can\u2019t really be seen? A Canadian-led team has not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[712,49,48,66,306],"class_list":["post-509079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}