Andrew Fox

There's been cases where people have seen these gas clouds without any obvious stars.

But we've never found one quite like Cloud 9 before, the new one in our latest research.

And in particular, we've never pointed just so long with the Hubble telescope at one of these clouds.

In other words, we were really taking a very deep, long exposure to see if there's anything there.

So we wouldn't really have expected that it would be so empty.

That was the great surprise and the great finding here is that even with the Hubble, with some of the sharpest eyes we have in space, we still couldn't find any stars.

And that tells you that there really is very little stellar content, very little stars in this thing at all.

I think it's a very promising direction.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, these clouds, you can think of them as a window into a dark matter-dominated cloud, a window into the dark universe.

We don't have many places we can look without stars because the stars are so bright, they take your attention, and they make it harder to see what's happening underneath.

With Cloud9, the lack of stars, we can turn that to our advantage...

Where we found Cloud9 is not close to M94.

It's way out in the outer halo, in the outskirts of that system.

And we think that's really important because if it had been found much closer in, nearby to the galaxy, there's all sorts of processes that could have destroyed it by now.

But it's quite happy sitting where it is in the outer halo and giving us this great chance to study it and to look at what the cloud is actually made of in terms of its dark matter content.

Getting the first one is always the hardest thing.

But we want to look for more of a population of clouds with similar properties.

That's certainly going to be helpful for following up on this.