A galaxy called NGC 6789, as seen with the 2-meter twin telescope.
Ignacio Trujillo et al. 2025
About 12 million light years away lies an impossible galaxy. Over the past 600 million years, new stars have been forming in its core, but there is no obvious source of the fuel that fueled this star formation.
This galaxy, named NGC 6789, was first discovered in 1883, but only in the last few decades has it become clear that it is still forming new stars. NGC 6789 is located towards the constellation Draco in an area called the Local Void, so named because it's almost empty here is one of the few galaxies floating in the void, and it is extremely isolated compared to most other galaxies we see in the Universe.
This makes it star formation especially mysterious. Galaxies need gas to form new stars, and there is very little of it in the Local Void. NGC 6789 is at least 1 billion years old, so it should have used up its original gas by now, but over the past 600 million years it has formed a mass about 100 million times that of the Sun's stars: about 4 percent of its total stellar mass.
Ignacio Trujillo from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands and his colleagues used the twin two-meter telescope at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife to take deeper images of the galaxy than we have done before, hoping to find evidence of an event that could lead to the gas. merger with another galaxy or some gas flow that we missed earlier, we might expect to see some distortion in NGC 6789's shape.
But the new images revealed no irregularities at all. Perhaps NGC 6789's formation, oddly enough, left behind some gas or some particularly tenuous nearby gas reservoir that did not cause any changes in the shape of the galaxy. But at the moment the mystery remains unsolved.
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