New low-mass galaxy discovered

Astronomers have reported the discovery of a new galaxy in the constellation Corvus. The newly discovered galaxy, named Corvus A, is relatively low-mass, gas-rich, and isolated. The discovery was published in a research paper. Published July 3rd Preprint Server arXiv.

One project that has found a large number of nearby low-mass galaxy candidates is the Semi-Automated Machine Learning Semi-Resolved Galaxies Search (SEAMLESS), which masks out high surface brightness emissions from stars and bright galaxies and filters images at a range of scales to identify faint extended sources.

Corvus A was first identified in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) legacy imaging survey. Recently, a team of astronomers led by Michael G. Jones from the University of Arizona, Tucson, conducted follow-up observations of the object using facilities including the Magellan Clay Telescope and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Interferometer (VLA), confirming that Corvus A is a low-mass galaxy.

“Corvus A is a newly discovered low-mass galaxy identified during the early stages of the SEAMLESS project,” the researchers wrote.

Observations revealed that Corvus A has an irregular structure, with a region of young blue stars dominating the light in the east, leading astronomers to emphasize that its blue, clumpy, irregular appearance is reminiscent of Leonis P, a small star-forming irregular galaxy in the constellation Leo. Leonis P is the smallest galaxy in the Local Group, with an estimated stellar mass of about 560,000 solar masses.

According to the paper, Corvus A, with a semiluminosity radius of 834, Light yearsis only a few times more massive than Leo P and contains a large number of young stars that are no more than 200 million years old. The study found that Corvus A is a gas-rich galaxy, lacking regions of ionized interstellar atomic hydrogen, so-called HII regions.

The distance to Callas A was measured to be about 11.3 million light years, and no other objects were found to exist. Galaxy Located within about 3.3 million light-years of Corvus A, it is a very isolated galaxy.

The astronomers note that Corvus A’s proximity makes it an ideal target for high-resolution follow-up observations at both radio and visible wavelengths, which could reveal more about the kinematics of this newly discovered low-mass galaxy.

“With higher spectral and spatial resolution data (e.g., from MeerKAT or additional VLA configurations), it should be possible to separate the spreading from warm and cold neutral media and to distinguish contributions from turbulence and rotation, at which point it may be possible to fit kinematic models and determine the rotation rate, provided the tilt is not too small,” the authors conclude.

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