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Hi Mike,
Your very own galaxy......most impressive! Can I take out a lease on it?
But seriously now, the up-and-coming field of "near-field cosmology" tries to characterize the contents of local universe, accurately, so as to try to trace back evolutionary events to the era of Galaxy Formation.
Thus there is a lot of interest in characterizing small and ultra-low surface brightness objects like this, in the nearby groups of galaxies. Thus, surveys of the local galaxy groups such as Sculptor, Centaurus (M83+NGC5128), M81 group, etc., keep on turning up more and more of these little galaxies.
Small dwarf galaxies may not seem much...... just a smattering of widely-spaced stars.... but the lower the galaxy luminosity, the higher is the fraction of dark matter in a galaxy;
so tiny ultra-low surface brightness galaxies have to be a virtual "cannonball" in terms of their total (mainly dark) mass, so as to gravitationally hold together that smattering of stars.
The work of Ken Freeman and John Kormendy in fact shows that if we go to sufficiently low galaxy luminosity, there may be "exclusively dark matter" galaxies which have formed no, or virtually no, stars.
So what you are actually chasing when you discover ultra-low surface brightness dwarf galaxies like this one is "dark galaxies" made up of either all dark matter, or nearly all dark matter.
Cheers
Bad galaxy man
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