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NASA’s Hubble Uncovers Case of Missing Oxygen in Nearby Dwarf Galaxies

Photo: NASA

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just revealed a mystery in our cosmic neighborhood. In a paper published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers using Hubble studied 37 nearby dwarf galaxies — small galaxies containing a few thousand to hundreds of millions of stars — and found that much of the oxygen they expected to see is missing.

Simulations predict that significantly more oxygen, a tracer of a wider set of heavy elements, should reside in these galaxies. So where did it go?

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