J0613+52 is heavy and has a similar motion to the galaxy containing Earth, but it is completely an empty ghost.
The research team led by astrophysicist Karen O’Neil from the Green Bank Observatory (USA) had to color galaxy J0613+52 to describe its structure and rotation, because in reality In reality it is a completely transparent shadow.
The authors believe this strange object is expanding our understanding of what made up the primordial universe.
The only thing wrong is that inside this galaxy… there is nothing. It’s like in a ghost movie: You see the bed sink under the weight of a human but don’t see anything lying on it.
Normal spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are characterized by large, massive disks of stars, which are disks of light, part of which form the Milky Way across the sky.
J0613+52 appears to have no stars! But it is massive and has the behavior of a galaxy, so it is still considered a galaxy.
Analyzes suggest that J0613+52 may be composed mainly of primitive, heavy but invisible filaments of air. It’s also possible that it has some stars but we don’t see them.
The accidental discovery of the “ghost galaxy” came from the Green Bank Observatory’s instruments accidentally pointing to the wrong coordinates and finding something strange.
There is a lot of hydrogen gas there, in levels expected from a spiral galaxy. The phenomenon of Doppler shift of radio waves related to rotation was also observed. Even so, there was absolutely nothing to be seen, like a ghost controlling everything.
Green Bank data also shows that this object may be a “time machine” that takes us back to the dawn of the universe.
J0613+52 may represent the first group of galaxies born after the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. It appears as a well-preserved fossil, isolated, undisturbed, having experienced no gravitational interactions in the 13.8 billion years since the universe’s birth.