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Space
Space
Science
Keith Cooper

The faintest star system orbiting our Milky Way may be dominated by dark matter

Milky way Simon Smith the University of Victoria
A split screen of black space. on the left, many stars are scattered. on the right, fewer, fainter stars are scattered mostly in the center, but no on the sides. .

A bizarre system of stars that is either an ancient cluster or the most dark-matter-dominated dwarf galaxy ever found is enticing astronomers who hope it could help explain how our Milky Way galaxy formed.

Discovered to lie 30,000 light-years away by astronomers at the University of Victoria in Canada and Yale University in the United States, the system, known as Ursa Major III/Unions 1 (UMa3/U1), contains only 60 visible stars amounting to just 16 times the mass of our sun and spanning an area only 10 light-years across.

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