Starts With A Bang podcast #115 – Dwarf galaxies in isolation
- All throughout the Universe, galaxies grow in two main ways: by merging with other galaxies and by accreting matter, slowly, from the intergalactic medium.
- Nearby, we find large numbers of tiny galaxies, but they’re all the victims of bullying: having been influenced by larger, more massive neighbors like Andromeda and our own Milky Way.
- If we want to know how these tiny galaxies, the most abundance in the Universe, grow up, we need to find them in isolation. That’s exactly what our guest, Dr. Catherine (Cat) Fielder, specializes in!
Sure, it’s easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe’s stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, the overwhelming majority of galaxies are much smaller and lower in mass than we and our cousins are. These low-mass galaxies, the dwarf galaxies in the Universe, represent upwards of 97% of all the galaxies that exist.
However, while most of the dwarf galaxies we know of are found as satellites around larger, more massive galaxies, they aren’t good laboratories for helping us understand the Universe as it was long ago. Back during the first few billion years of cosmic history, it wasn’t just dwarf galaxies that formed the majority of starlight in the cosmos, but isolated dwarf galaxies: dwarf galaxies that hadn’t yet interacted with larger neighbors.
We can best understand those early-stage galaxies by studying their late-time analogues: isolated dwarf galaxies in the Universe today. On this edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I sit down with Dr. Catherine (Cat) Fielder, and we talk about some of the nearest, most isolated galaxies of all: including some that have been imaged with flagship-quality telescopes. What have we learned about them so far, and what else are we hoping to discover? Find out here, today!
