Shany Danieli

The James Webb Space Telescope spotted a luminous streak in a distant galaxy, like the wake of a speedboat, only two hundred thousand light-years long. At the head of this trail races a supermassive black hole, plowing through tenuous gas at 954 km/s. The gas gets compressed, heats up, and glows.

A population census, but instead of houses (galaxies, and instead of residents) stars. Astronomers set out to count the smallest and faintest "homesteads" in our cosmic neighborhood: dwarf galaxies. They are thousands of times fainter than the Milky Way, and spotting them in images is as hard as picking out a firefly in front of a spotlight.

In the constellation Cetus, 65 million light-years from Earth, three dwarf galaxies nestle: DF2, DF4, and DF9. All have been declared “galaxies without dark matter” — the mysterious invisible substance that usually holds stars together.