NASA telescope discovers cosmic fossil lurking in deep space

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There are many objects out in deep space that humans have yet to discover, but NASA can add one more to the "discovered" list and that is a fossil lurking millions of light years away from our planet.

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The newly discovered object is called the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy, and it's located approximately 3 million light years away from Earth. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on the location of the galaxy, revealing some of its contents, which are believed to be groups of billions of old stars.

Now why would old stars be of any use to astronomers? NASA explains this galaxy is referred to as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy, which a smaller galaxy that contains stars that aren't very bri due to their old age. Additionally, these galaxies contain a small quantity of dust, making visibility much easier for optical space telescopes such as Hubble. Notably, the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy is approximately 3.6 million light years away from the center mass of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes our own Milky Way galaxy.

Furthermore, 3.6 million light years away from the center of the Local Group would put the Tucana Galaxy at the very edge of the Local Group, and NASA believes Tucana's location may be a result of a collision with a neighboring galaxy called Andromeda approximately 11 billion years ago.

"Dwarf galaxies could be the early ingredients for larger galaxies, and with older stars residing in such an isolated environment, analyzing them can help trace galaxy formation back to the dawn of time," NASA officials said in the statement