Newly-Discovered Cache of Red Dwarves Triples the Number of Known Stars in the Universe
Elliptical galaxies: boring, but important An image from the Palomar Observatory Digital Sky Survey of NGC 4261 via chandra.harvard.edu In a paper published today in the journal Nature, astronomers from Yale and Harvard universities have found evidence for a bunch of small red dwarf stars in eight nearby galaxies. The result affects astronomers' pictures of how stars form, how galaxies evolve, and perhaps even how much dark matter is out there. Red dwarfs are stars like the sun, but smaller, fainter and cooler, with somewhere between one-half and one-tenth the sun's mass. They may be small, but they are legion-astronomers estimate that red dwarfs outnumber sun-like stars in the Milky Way by a factor of 100. Until today's result, astronomers had been forced to assume that the 100-to-1 ratio held in other galaxies, too. But evidence has been mounting recently that elliptical galaxies-which lack the distinctive spiral arms of galaxies like...