Look into the night sky and you’ll glimpse the stars from hundreds of billions of galaxies. Some galaxies are swirling blue disks like our own Milky Way, others are red spheres or misshapen, clumpy messes or something in between. Why the different configurations? It turns out that a galaxy’s shape tells us something about the events in that galaxy’s ultra-long life.

At the very basic level there are two classifications for galaxy shapes: disk and elliptical. A disk galaxy, also called a spiral galaxy, is shaped like a fried egg, said Cameron Hummels, theoretical astrophysicist at Caltech. These galaxies have a more spherical center, like the yolk, surrounded by a disk of gas and stars — the egg white. The Milky Way and our nearest galaxy neighbor Andromeda fall into this category.

Scientists have spotted six galaxies that appear trapped in orbit around a supermassive black hole that astronomers are seeing as it was when the universe was less than a billion years old.

95% of our universe is missing.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents strong observational evidence of numerous previously unobserved anomalous circular spots, of significantly raised temperature, in the cosmic microwave background sky. The spots have angular radii between 0.03 and 0.04 rad (i.e. angular diameters between about 3° and 4°). There is a clear cut-off at that size, indicating that each anomalous spot would have originated from a highly energetic point-like source, located at the end of inflation – or else point-like at the conformally expanded Big Bang, if it is considered that there was no inflationary phase. The significant presence of these anomalous spots, was initially noticed in the Planck 70 GHz satellite data by comparison with 1000 standard simulations, and then confirmed by extending the comparison to 10 000 simulations. Such anomalous points were then found at precisely the same locations in the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) data, their significance was confirmed by comparison with 1000 WMAP simulations. Planck and WMAP have very different noise properties and it seems exceedingly unlikely that the observed presence of anomalous points in the same directions on both maps may come entirely from the noise. Subsequently, further confirmation was found in the Planck data by comparison with 1000 FFP8.1 MC simulations (with l ≤ 1500). The existence of such anomalous regions, resulting from point-like sources at the conformally stretched-out big bang, is a predicted consequence of conformal cyclic cosmology, these sources being the Hawking points of the theory, resulting from the Hawking radiation from supermassive black holes in a cosmic aeon prior to our own.

The mystery of a galaxy that shouldn’t have existed could now have a solution. Dragonfly 44, a faint galaxy that was found in 2016 to consist of 99.99 percent dark matter, has been closely re-examined, revealing a lower and more normal proportion of dark matter.

This would mean that we don’t have to revise our models of galaxy formation to try to figure out how they could have produced such an extreme outlier — everything is behaving completely normally, the researchers said.

“Dragonfly 44 (DF44) has been an anomaly all these years that could not be explained with the existing galaxy formation models,” said astronomer Teymoor Saifollahi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.