Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Astronomers make an accidental discovery: The tiny dwarf galaxy Bedin 1

By

One of the amazing things about scientific research is that we don’t only learn about the things we’re looking at — sometimes we make amazing discoveries by chance as well. That’s what happened this week, when astronomers accidentally discovered a new galaxy while studying part of the Milky Way.

Astronomers were using data from the Hubble Space Telescope to study white dwarf stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752, a spherical group of stars that orbit around the core of the Milky Way. They were hoping to learn about how old the globular cluster is by studying these stars, but in the process they found something unexpected. When looking at an area right on the edge of the field of view of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, they spotted a clump of faint stars. But on further inspection of their brightness and temperatures, the scientists realized that these stars were not a part of the globular cluster and were in fact much, much more distant.

Recommended Videos

The newly observed stars were in fact millions of light-years away and are part of a relatively small galaxy that is just 3000 light-years across. The galaxy is not only tiny but is also very faint, meaning that it is unlikely we would have ever discovered it had astronomers not been studying the area in front of the galaxy in detail. The new galaxy is classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy and has been named Bedin 1 after Luigi Bedin, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and the leader of the team who made the discovery.

This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a part of the globular cluster NGC 6752. The observations were made to study white dwarfs within it and to use these stars to measure the age of the globular cluster. Analyzing the data, astronomers discovered a previously unknown galaxy behind the globular cluster. The galaxy, nicknamed Bedin 1, is visible as a collection of faint stars at the top left of the image. ESA/Hubble, NASA, Bedin et al.

Bedin 1 is an unusual galaxy in that it is very isolated from others, lying 30 million light-years from the Milky Way and 2 million light-years from the nearest large galaxy, NGC 6744. This makes it likely the most isolated small dwarf galaxy discovered so far.

Related

To get an impression of how Bedin 1 was discovered, the below video shows a zoomed in journey to globular cluster NGC 6752, with a final view captured by the Hubble of the bright stars of the cluster in the foreground and faint stars of a background galaxy behind. This background galaxy is Bedin 1, the galaxy that was found by accident.

Zooming in on NGC 6752 and Bedin 1

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more