The dwarf galaxy is located in the center of Canis Major, the constellation that’s home to the Dog Star - Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. To the ancient Greeks, Canis Major, in particular Sirius, represents a hunting dog following Orion, helping the hunter in pursuit of Lepus the Hare.

Discovered just recently in 2003 by an international team of astronomers from France, Italy, the UK, and Australia, the Canis Major Dwarf is only 25,000 light years away from earth. Just across town by comparison to Sagittarius at 50,000 light years from earth. The team sifted though data on millions of stars collected by 2MASS (the Two-Micron All Sky Survey) and discovered an unusually dense area of M Giants (a class of star). The 2MASS survey scanned the entire sky at three near-infrared wavelengths with 1.3-meter telescopes in Chile and Arizona to “look through” clouds of dust and gas in our Milky Way Galaxy to get a clearer, more accurate picture of it’s makeup.
The Canis Major Dwarf, classified as an irregular galaxy, went undetected for many years because of this dust in the Milky Way’s atmosphere. The decaying galaxy lies very close to our galaxy’s galactic plane where it’s […]

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