Scientists just viewed one of the tiniest, most isolated, lowest-mass galaxies ever found with JWST. Despite all odds, it’s still growing.
Here in our cosmic neighborhood, galaxies come in all sorts of sizes, masses, and shapes. The largest, most massive galaxies in the Local Group are the Milky Way and our big sister, Andromeda: two galaxies representative of modern large spirals. While galaxies like our own are easy to find all throughout the Universe, they’re not the most common type of galaxy at all. Instead, it’s smaller, lower-mass galaxies that are far and away the most common, with an estimated 30-to-100 tiny dwarf galaxies found throughout the Universe for every one Milky Way-like galaxy out there. While the largest, brightest, most massive galaxies are the easiest ones to spot, it’s actually the smaller, more common, lower-mass galaxies that are primarily responsible for blowing away the intergalactic neutral gas and making the cosmos visible.
Some of the small galaxies that we find have large reservoirs of gas within them, where they continue to form stars throughout their lives, while others are virtually gas-free, having formed all of their stars in just one major burst that occurred long ago. However, the small galaxies that…
