Galaxy X is a postulated dark satellite

dwarf Dwarf or dwarves may refer to: Common uses *Dwarf (folklore), a being from Germanic mythology and folklore * Dwarf, a person or animal with dwarfism Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Dwarf (''Dungeons & Dragons''), a humanoid ...

galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

of the Milky Way Galaxy. If it exists, it would be composed mostly of dark matter and interstellar gas with few

star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...

s. Its proposed location is some from the Sun, behind the disk of the Milky Way, and some in extent. Galactic coordinates would be (l= -27.4°,b=-1.08°).

Discovery

Observational evidence for this galaxy was presented in 2015, based on the claimed discovery of four

Cepheid variable star A Cepheid variable () is a type of star that pulsates radially, varying in both diameter and temperature and producing changes in brightness with a well-defined stable period and amplitude. A strong direct relationship between a Cepheid vari ...

s by Sukanya Chakrabarti (RIT) and collaborators. Search for the stars was motivated by an earlier study that linked a warp in the HI (atomic hydrogen) disk of the Milky Way Galaxy to the tidal effects of a perturbing galaxy. The unseen perturber's mass was calculated to be about 1%approximately 10 billion

solar mass The solar mass () is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. It is approximately equal to the mass ...

es of that of the Milky Way, which would make it the third heaviest satellite of the Milky Way, after the Magellanic Clouds (

Large Magellanic Cloud The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), or Nubecula Major, is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of around 50 kiloparsecs (≈160,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the ...

and

Small Magellanic Cloud The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), or Nubecula Minor, is a dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way. Classified as a dwarf irregular galaxy, the SMC has a D25 isophotal diameter of about , and contains several hundred million stars. It has a total mass of ...

, each some 10x larger than Galaxy X). In this hypothetical model, the putative satellite galaxy would have interacted with the Milky Way some 600 million years ago, coming as close as , and would now be moving away from the Milky Way.

Name

The name "Galaxy X" was coined in 2011 in analogy to

Planet X Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and continued at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell's ...

Controversy

In November 2015, a group led by P. Pietrukowicz published a paper arguing against the existence of Galaxy X. These authors argued that the four stars were not actually Cepheid variable stars and that their distances might be very different than claimed in the discovery paper of Chakrabarti et al. On this basis, the authors stated that "there is no evidence for a background dwarf galaxy". However the galaxy is still regarded to exist by others, with the stars being examined to be actual Cepheids.

List of components

List of claimed components of ''Galaxy X''

Discovery

Name

Controversy

List of components

Footnotes

References

Further reading