What you're seeing is the galaxy J0613+52.
A dark galaxy made up of hydrogen and dark matter— but no visible stars!
If it doesn't have any star, how was it discovered?
The discovery was a complete error. On January 2024, When a team at the Green Bank Observatory accidentally pointed their telescope to the wrong coordinates, instead of finding nothing, they detected a strong radio signal.
The signal came from an enormous cloud of cold hydrogen gas weighing a trillion solar masses.
How do we know?
Because neutral hydrogen emits a specific microwave radiation with wavelength of 21 cm, which is not affected by dust absorption.
Green Bank Observatory
Astronomers are still trying to find why this Galaxy doesn't have any stars. If it has, why aren't they visible?
One of the reasons might be that the gas is too thin and spread out to collapse and form stars.
It is also very isolated— there are no known galaxies within ~330 million light years of it.
That's staggering, even on cosmic scales! For comparison, distance between Milky Way and Andromeda is ‘mere’ 2.5 million light years.
When galaxies interact and collide, it churns their gas and triggers star formation. J0163+52 never got a chance.
What's interesting is that this galaxy might be a “primordial galaxy”— an incredibly rare phenomenon when an object made up of gas remains largely unchanged since the early universe.
We shot in dark, with a couple of wrong coordinates, and ended up finding a galaxy which we won't have found if we relied on light. Just imagine how many hidden galaxies there might be spread across the universe!
Space isn't just “out there”. It is full of mysterious places waiting to be explored… who knows what we’ll find?