Mysterious 'Galaxy X' Around Milky Way May

Fri Feb 11, 2011 8:35 pm » by **Savwafair2012**

My hope is that this method can serve as a probe of mass distribution and of dark matter in galaxies, in the way that gravitational lensing today has become a probe for distant galaxies," Chakrabarti said in a statement.

Chakrabarti will present the details and findings of these tests at a presentation at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Searching for Galaxy X

Chakrabarti predicted the mass of Galaxy X to be one-hundredth that of the Milky Way itself.

The galaxy currently sits across the Milky Way somewhere in the constellations of Norma or Circinus, just west of the galactic center in Sagittarius when viewed from Earth, based on the calculations by Chakrabarti and her colleague Leo Blitz, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Chakrabarti compared her prediction of Galaxy X with previous arguments for a Planet X beyond the orbit of Neptune.

In the 19th century, what would have been a ninth planet at that time was proposed by famed astronomer Percival Lowell, but the prediction turned out to be based on incorrect measurements of Neptune's orbit.

In fact, Pluto and other objects in the Kuiper Belt, where the planet was predicted to reside, have masses far too low to exert a measurable gravitational effect on Neptune or Uranus, Chakrabarti said. Since then, perturbations in the orbits of other bodies in the solar system have set off periodic searches for a 10th planet beyond the now "dwarf" planet Pluto.

http://www.livescience.com/9288-mysteri ... milky.html