Astronomers have discovered a previously unknown pair of potential satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. The location of these dwarf galaxies suggests that hundreds of other unknown mini-galaxies could be hiding around us — potentially challenging our understanding of the galaxy's edges.
A satellite galaxy is a clump of stars, either in a circular blob or a halo-like shape, that orbit the Milky Way independently from the rest of the galaxy. Our galaxy's largest-known satellite is the Large Magellanic Cloud, which holds around 30 billion stars and can be viewed with the naked eye. Other known satellites only contain a few hundred thousand or a couple of million stars.
