LONDON A total of nine dwarf galaxies orbiting our Milky Way were discovered in the southern hemisphere sky near the Magellanic Clouds.
They are a billion times fainter than the Milky Way and a million times less massive, the astronomers at the University of Cambridge, one of the authors of the discovery team.
The closest of which is about 97 thousand light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Reticulum, and seems to be being torn due to tidal forces of our galaxy; Farther, 1.2 million light years, is on the edge of the Milky Way, towards the constellation of Eridanus.
The Milky Way is not alone in the universe, but part of the so-called Group Local, with two other large spiral galaxies (Andromeda and the lower triangle)
The smallest known dwarf star has five thousand, compared to some hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, which are difficult to detect because of their low light even in our cosmic neighborhood.
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