Team of Astronomers Identify 7 Dwarf Galaxies Using New 'Dragonfly' Telescope

Astronomers at Yale University have identified seven new dwarf galaxies, potentially providing new evidence about dark matter and celestial evolution.

According to a Yale news release, the team of astronomers used a new type of telescope that pieces together telephoto lenses. The new class of dwarf galaxies went unnoticed before because of their scattered nature.

The team published their study in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"We got an exciting result in our first images," study lead author Allison Merritt, a Yale graduate student, said in the release. "It was very exciting. It speaks to the quality of the telescope."

Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, aided Merritt and Pieter van Dokkum, Yale's astronomy chair, in designing the Dragonfly Telephoto Array telescope. Using eight different telephoto lenses, the telescope was able to reign in the disseminated galaxies' surface light.

"These are the same kind of lenses that are used in sporting events like the World Cup. We decided to point them upward instead," van Dokkum said in the release. "We knew there was a whole set of science questions that could be answered if we could see diffuse objects in the sky.

"It's a new domain. We're exploring a region of parameter space that had not been explored before."

The telescope was named after the dragonfly because the telephoto lenses resemble the eye on the insect. Abraham and van Dokkum built the Dragonfly Telescope in 2012 at the New Mexico Skies observatory.

The research team said NASA was intrigued enough with their findings that the space agency granted them permission to use the Hubble Telescope for future studies. As of now, the Yale-led astronomy team cannot determine how close these seven dwarf galaxies are.

"There are predictions from galaxy formation theory about the need for a population of very diffuse, isolated galaxies in the universe," Merritt said. "It may be that these seven galaxies are the tip of the iceberg, and there are thousands of them in the sky that we haven't detected yet."