Starts With A Bang #97 - Tiny Galaxies and Us

When we look at our nearby Universe, it's easy to recognize our own galaxy and the other large, massive ones that are nearby: Andromeda, the major galaxies in nearby groups like Bode's Galaxy, the group of galaxies in Leo, and the huge galaxies at the cores of the Virgo and Coma Clusters, among others. But these are not most of the galaxies in the Universe at all; the overwhelming majority of galaxies are small, low-mass dwarf galaxies, and if we want to understand how we formed and where we came from, it's these objects that we need to be studying more intensely.

So what is it that we already know about them? What has recent research revealed about these tiny galaxies in the nearby Universe, both inside and beyond our Local Group, and what else can we look forward to learning in the relatively near future? Join me for a fascinating discussion with Prof. Mia de los Reyes of Amherst College, as we dive into the science of the tiniest galaxies of all, and what they can teach us about our cosmic history as a whole!

(This image shows a map of stars in the outer regions of the Milky Way, from the northern celestial hemisphere, with several galactic streams visible. The color-coding indicates the distance to the stars, and the brightness indicates the density of stars in that patch of sky. In the white circles are faint companions of the Milky Way discovered by the SDSS: only two are globular clusters, the rest are all dwarf galaxies. Credit: V. Belokurov and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey)