Researchers are lucky to have discovered a very dim galaxy that is helping scientists better understand what dark matter is. This discovery happened when they were studying the sky as part of a project and using a radio telescope to search. The galaxy was named Nube, which means “cloud” in Spanish. Surprisingly, this galaxy has surprisingly few stars, only about 390 million solar masses, and the rest of its mass is made up of dark matter that we cannot see.
The Nube Galaxy is sparse and spreads over a vast space. Scientists say galaxies like our Milky Way should be surrounded by many small dwarf galaxies that are mostly made of dark matter. We see some of these small galaxies, but there must be many more to match what scientific theories predict.
The discovery of Nube is exactly what confirms these assumptions: the galaxy was too dim to be included in the catalogs, and it was found completely by accident. This reminds us that there may be many more galaxies hidden from our eyes. And although we don’t see black holes either, scientists are confident of their existence thanks to mathematical calculations. It’s the same with dark matter – the more we know, the more confident we will become in its reality.