Andrew Fox

We were excited because we'd been studying this cloud near the galaxy M94.

This cloud's been known for a few years.

But we pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at this cloud, expecting to find some stars.

And if we'd seen stars that would have confirmed that this cloud is really a small galaxy,

something like many other galaxies that are out there.

But what we found was that there are no stars, even though we pointed at this object for a very long time with the Hubble telescope.

And that told us that it's a different type of object, an object that is gas rich, but that is almost completely starless.

And so we were excited because in a way that was a surprise.

We didn't find the stars we were expecting to see.

We found just a blank piece of sky, a completely empty cloud.

And that's a really interesting clue about what the nature of this object is.

Yeah, it's a great question because, as Deep mentioned, most of the matter in the universe is not thought to be in atoms and molecules, the regular matter we can see around us on Earth and in our solar system.

Most of the matter is thought to be dark, which means it doesn't emit any light.

We can only infer it by seeing its effects on the matter around it.

for example, the gravity that the dark matter can provide.

Now, this lambda CDM model, it's accepted as the prevailing, the commonly accepted model of where the matter is in the universe and the matter condenses into galaxies.

And those live in what we call halos because the matter is concentrated into different patches.

We call those halos.

Most massive halos have galaxies in them.

So when we look out into the night sky, we see those galaxies.