'It shouldn't exist,' say stunned astronomers after NASA discovers impossible object

ASTRONOMERS have encountered a faint, isolated dwarf galaxy that baffles them.

The dwarf galaxy, nicknamed PEARLSDG, is located about 98 million light-years away and has no known neighbors.

The researchers discovered this oddity in space while analyzing an image taken with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

In particular, JWST's PEARLS (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science) observing program encountered the cluster.

It was found in the background of an image of other galaxies and showed a lack of star formation activity.

This is considered very unusual for an isolated dwarf galaxy, as most of our observations show exactly the opposite.

Dwarf galaxies are typically small galaxies consisting of a few billion stars and isolated.

Therefore, this isolated but inactive dwarf galaxy was not predicted to exist.

NASA's discovery challenges our current understanding of galaxy evolution.

“These types of isolated, quiescent dwarf galaxies have not been seen before, except in relatively few cases,” co-author Tim Carleton, an assistant research scientist at Arizona State University, said in a statement.

“They're not really expected to exist given our current understanding of galaxy evolution, so seeing this object helps us improve our theories of galaxy formation,” he added.

“In general, dwarf galaxies that exist on their own continue to form new stars.”

JWST was able to observe the galaxy in ultraviolet, optical and infrared wavelengths.

The cluster was also looked at alongside spectroscopic data from the DeVeny Optical Spectrograph on the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona.

PEARLSDG is one of the most distant galaxies that can be observed in this kind of detail.

Researchers published the new findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.