Conversation

The Milky Way is surrounded by a halo of smaller satellite dwarf galaxies, with at least 61 within 1.4 million light-years of Earth. There are undoubtedly more, and astronomers have used the Subaru telescope to search almost 3% of the sky looking for them. Astronomers conducting the survey have found nine satellite galaxies within the surveyed area, which is a higher rate than is predicted by recent models. They were only expecting to find about four.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05439