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The new type of faint, fluffy galaxy might help resolve a cosmological conundrum

For The Daily Beast:

When we think of galaxies, we tend to focus on the beautiful spirals, like the Milky Way, or possibly the huge elliptical galaxies. However, we know that a lot of galaxies are small, and those are harder to spot. In fact, astronomers have observed far fewer low-mass galaxies than predicted by theory, which has been a puzzle and a problem.

A new discovery might help with the answer. Astronomers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii found 854 nearly invisible galaxies in the Coma Cluster. These hidden objects are very large—some are roughly the size of the Milky Way—but extremely low density. This new census is a notable increase in the population of the Coma Cluster, which is already a large galaxy cluster. It’s likely that other galaxy clusters could be hiding fluffy faint galaxies too. [Read more in The Daily Beast…]