NASA Hubble finds 1st extragalactic globular stream in UGC 9050-Dw1
Technology
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope just found something big: the first-ever stellar stream from a globular cluster discovered beyond the Milky Way.
This faint trail of stars showed up in archival Hubble data, and the stream is in galaxy UGC 9050-Dw1, about 115 million light-years away.
Scientists think it's what's left of a star cluster being pulled apart by its own galaxy.
Hubble stream enables dark matter mapping
This discovery lets researchers map the galaxy's mass, including both stars and invisible dark matter, which accounts for about 80 to 85% of the universe.
The team says finding this stream in such a faint, "ultra-diffuse" galaxy is a huge leap forward for understanding how galaxies form and how dark matter is spread out.