A 'ghost' galaxy was found hiding right in the neighborhood of our closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Andromeda XXXVI: discovery of a new ultra-faint dwarf galaxy towards M31
arXiv · 2603.28492
The Takeaway
Andromeda XXXVI is one of the faintest and most compact galaxies ever found, serving as a 'fossil' from the early universe. Its discovery right next door suggests that the space around us is likely teeming with thousands of nearly invisible galaxies that have avoided detection until now.
From the abstract
We present deep imaging of Andromeda XXXVI (And XXXVI), a dwarf galaxy discovered through visual inspection of the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey, using observations obtained with the OSIRIS+@GTC instrument. The colour-magnitude diagram of And XXXVI shows a well-defined red giant branch (RGB). However, constraining a distance is challenging because the tip of the RGB is sparsely populated and no horizontal branch stars are found. The RGB is nevertheless well matched by an old (12.5 Gyr), me