The Phoenix Dwarf is a dwarf irregular galaxy discovered in 1976 by Hans-Emil Schuster and Richard Martin West and mistaken for a

globular cluster A globular cluster is a spheroidal conglomeration of stars that is bound together by gravity, with a higher concentration of stars towards its center. It can contain anywhere from tens of thousands to many millions of member stars, all orbiting ...

. It is currently 1.44 Mly away from

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to Planetary habitability, harbor life. This is enabled by Earth being an ocean world, the only one in the Solar System sustaining liquid surface water. Almost all ...

. Its name comes from the fact that it is part of the Phoenix constellation.

Characteristics

The Phoenix Dwarf has an inner part of young

star A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by Self-gravitation, self-gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night sk ...

s which is stretched in an east-west direction and an outer part of mainly old stars that is stretched north-south. The central region's rate of

star formation Star formation is the process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space—sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions"—Jeans instability, collapse and form stars. As a branch of astronomy, sta ...

seems to have been relatively constant across time (Martínez-Delgado et al. 1999). In 1999, St-Germain et al. discovered a

H I region An HI region or H I region (read ''H one'') is a cloud in the interstellar medium composed of neutral atomic hydrogen (HI), in addition to the local abundance of helium and other elements. (H is the chemical symbol for hydrogen, and "I" is the Ro ...

of about 10⁵ just to the west of Phoenix. Its

radial velocity The radial velocity or line-of-sight velocity of a target with respect to an observer is the rate of change of the vector displacement between the two points. It is formulated as the vector projection of the target-observer relative velocity ...

is −23 km/s and may be physically associated with Phoenix if it is found to have a similar radial velocity.

References

External links

* * {{Phoenix (constellation) Irregular galaxies Dwarf irregular galaxies Phoenix (constellation) 06830 ?