"Red Nugget Galaxies" Masquerade as Large Stars

Astronomers have discovered that they have been overlooking a great number of incredibly small galaxies, mainly because these celestial formations make incredibly use of a very small amount of space.

"These red nugget galaxies were hiding in plain view, masquerading as stars," Ivana Damjanov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in a statement.

Ivana made this discovery after she and her team analyzed countless images from the database of the largest international survey of the universe, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They identified nearly 200 potential red-nugget galaxies hiding in the older portion of the universe where our own Milky Way Galaxy resides.

These galaxies were then verified with a slow and painstaking process of finding in-depth analyses of these galaxies from telescopes like the Canada-France-Hawaii (CFH) telescope and NASA's Hubble telescope.

According to a Harvard-Smithsonian release, "the red nugget galaxies are so small that they appear like stars in Sloan photographs, due to blurring from Earth's atmosphere. However, their spectra give away their true nature."

"Now we know that many of these amazingly small, dense, but massive galaxies survive," said Margaret Geller, who was also involved in the study.

Geller says "massive,"  because what is unique about the galaxies is that they often contain ten times more stars than the Milky Way, but are so tightly packed that they take up the same volume as some of the universe's most massive stars.

Many red nugget galaxies are also older than most galaxies, being full of tiny and ancient red stars.

Astronomers have long known about red nuggets, which are prevalent in the younger portion of the expanding universe, but these are the first identified in the older near-universe.

Damjanov presented the team's findings on June 11, at a meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA) in Quebec, QC.