DDO 68: A Galaxy Of Deception

The nice thing about telescopes is that we can look back in time - light that is reaching us now may have originated a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which means astronomers can view the universe as it was when it was much younger. But sometimes we can be fooled by entire galaxies. DDO 68, otherwise known as UGC 5340, a ragged collection of stars and gas clouds, at first was thought to be a recently-formed galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood. But it's not as young as it looks.  A cosmic oddity, dwarf galaxy DDO 68. Credit: NASA, ESA. Acknowledgement: A. Aloisi (Space Telescope Science Institute) read more

Read the whole article on

More from