A newly discovered object expands our understanding of what a galaxy is. Called J0613+52, this massive cluster 270 million light-years away appears to have no stars. At least none of them could be seen. It’s just a cloud of gas found among stars in normal galaxies, drifting around on its own like a complete idiot.

Its mass and motion seem normal for a spiral galaxy… in fact, if you extract stars from a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way or Andromeda, J0613+52 is pretty much the same result you get.

This may be the first discovery of a primordial galaxy—a galaxy composed mostly of gas that formed at the dawn of time—in the nearby universe, according to a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Karen O’Neill of the Green Bank Observatory. The discovery, made entirely by chance, was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“GBT accidentally received the wrong coordinates and found this object,” says O’Neill. “This is a galaxy made entirely of gas; it has no visible stars. The stars may be there, but we can’t see them.”

Researchers used the Green Bank Observatory to search for and study low surface brightness galaxies, or LSBs. These are galaxies, mostly small dwarf galaxies, that do not emit much light because most of their content consists of gas and dark matter. It has very few stars compared to other galaxies.

The researchers wanted to measure the gas content and mass of LSB galaxies, so the study focused on finding gas, not stars, with the Green Bank Telescope, Arecibo Telescope, and Nançay Radio Telescope. Green Bank and Nansei were supposed to monitor the same area of ​​sky for part of the survey, but someone made a mistake in Green Bank’s coordinates, pointing it to a previously unexplored region of the sky.

Here, researchers detected a signature of hydrogen gas with the strength expected from a spiral galaxy. The researchers were even able to detect the Doppler shift of radio waves associated with the galaxy’s rotation; The wavelengths are lengthened in the part moving away from us and the wavelengths are shortened in the part turning towards us.

But there was no sign of stars in Green Bank’s radio data. The object appears isolated and intact; In 13.8 billion years, it has not experienced any gravitational interactions that would disrupt the gas, breaking it apart or pushing it into the clusters necessary to trigger significant star formation. This makes J0613+52 an object unlike anything we’ve seen before.

“What we know for sure is that this is an incredibly rich galaxy,” O’Neill says.

“It does not show star formation as we would expect, probably because its gas is too dispersed. It is also too far from other galaxies for any collisions to trigger star formation. J0613+52 appears to be both intact and underdeveloped. This may be our first discovery of a nearby galaxy composed of primordial gas.” ”

Working on this further might be a difficult task as it is very dark. It may not appear on other wavebands other than radio. And since it’s the first of its kind to be discovered, it seems rare. Researchers suggest it might be useful to scan the sky with the help of powerful radio telescopes to look for other similar objects.

Given the way matter in the universe appears to clump together, it’s possible that J0613+52 is the only one of its kind, at least in the nearby universe; A gas cloud that has drifted alone for billions of years, unchanged since the beginning of the universe. . A real miracle.