Find the Milky Way's hidden neighbor

A small celestial might exist right next to the Milky Way, but we don't see it.

Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz - two scientists from the University of California (USA) - commented that the gravitational force from a galaxy causes disturbances in the Milky Way's disk of dust.

" We have built many simulations of disturbance in the lines to understand the cause of the situation. In the most standard model, we find a small galaxy right next to the Milky Way. Chakrabarti has about 1% of the Milky Way, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun .

According to Chakrabarti, the galaxy is currently about 300,000 light-years away from Earth. But the simulated models show that it moves in a very flattened elliptical orbit. About 300 million years ago, it was only about 16,000 light-years from the Milky Way (closer to the distance between the Earth and the center of the Milky Way) and caused a disturbance in the disk of matter around our galaxy.

" The existence of a hidden galaxy near the Milky Way is a reasonable hypothesis. Unfortunately, we cannot observe it yet, " said Abraham Loeb, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (USA), commented.

Stealthy galaxies can move on the same plane as the Milky Way.(Photo: msu.edu)

Chakrabarti thinks that the small galaxy is still " invisible " because its brightness is quite weak . Usually galaxies only emit strong light if they have newborn stars and have lots of gas dust. So it is possible that the galaxy hides only the old stars and does not have much gas and dust.

Simulated models also show that the invisible galaxy's orbit lies on the same plane as the Milky Way orbit. If this galaxy is on the opposite side of the Milky Way at the present time, it can hide behind huge clouds of gas dust.

By studying the distribution of clouds of gas and dust, Chakrabarti hopes that he will determine the location of the invisible galaxy.

In the last century astronomers have discovered Uranus starring in unusual orbits by gravity from a distant planet. They then discovered that the planet was Neptune. If the invisible galaxy does exist, it will be the first galaxy near the Milky Way to be detected by gravity, not the light emitted by the stars.