Azernews.Az

By Alimat Aliyeva

Astronomers have identified an extraordinary galaxy composed almost entirely of dark matter. According to the journal Science, the discovery was made during the analysis of archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope, AzerNEWS reports.

The galaxy, dubbed CDG-2, is extremely faint and contains very few stars. Scientists estimate that over 99.9% of its total mass consists of dark matter, making it one of the most mysterious cosmic structures ever observed.

CDG-2 was detected in the Perseus galaxy cluster, about 240 million light-years from Earth. Subsequent observations from the European Euclid Space Telescope confirmed a faint glow, likely produced by the few stars that formed before the galaxy lost the gas necessary for star formation.

If CDG-2’s existence is confirmed, it could provide strong evidence for the theory that some galaxies in the Universe are almost entirely devoid of stars, consisting primarily of dark matter. This challenges our understanding of galaxy formation and the role of visible matter in the cosmos.

Interestingly, this is not the first dark galaxy ever discovered. Astronomers at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, USA, previously found a completely dark galaxy known as J0613+52. Unlike CDG-2, J0613+52 contains abundant primordial gas but no visible stars. Located about 270 million light-years from Earth, it may be the faintest galaxy ever detected.

Discoveries like CDG-2 and J0613+52 open a new frontier in astrophysics, revealing the hidden scaffolding of the Universe built from dark matter. Scientists hope that studying these “invisible” galaxies will help unravel one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology: what dark matter is and how it shapes the Universe.