Dwarf Companion Found Around Nearby Galaxy

It's not every day that you hear about the Hubble Space Telescope being beaten to the punch by some obscure observatory, yet this is precisely what happened recently. Experts using the Polaris Observatory Association's Centurion 28 telescope have just discovered a companion for NGC 4449.

This dwarf galaxy is located relatively close to the Milky Way, at a distance of just 12.5 million light-years. UCLA Anderson School of Management professor of finance Francis Longstaff, an amateur astronomer, made the discovery by using the little-known, 28-inch telescope.

The UCLA team was led by research astronomer Michael Rich, who says that the C28 telescope managed to discover the companion dwarf galaxy, called NGC 4449B, with relative ease. The object looked as if it had “experienced a close encounter with the nucleus of NGC 4449,” the team says.

Experts add that one of the reasons why the dwarf galaxy was not discovered thus far was because its brightness is 10 times lower than that of the night sky. Additional details of the study were published in the February 9 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.