Hubble Captures Rare Image Of A Galaxy Made Almost Entirely Of Invisible Dark Matter

Scientists using a trio of some of the world’s most powerful observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, ESA’s Euclid, and the Subaru Telescope, have pulled back the curtain on a ghost galaxy that is nearly 99% dark matter, detected thanks solely to its four associate globular clusters.

The discovery centers on the object named Candidate Dark Galaxy-2 (CDG-2), located approximately 300 million light-years away within the Perseus galaxy cluster. Unlike the Milky Way, which glows with the light of hundreds of billions of stars, CDG-2 is comparatively and remarkably dim, emitting a total luminosity equivalent to only about one million suns. Thus, in a crowded environment like the Perseus cluster, such a faint glow is easily swallowed by the light of its more boisterous neighbors.