NASA's Hubble studied dwarf galaxies and found they kept just 11% of the oxygen made by their stars

Our cosmic neighbourhood is full of surprises, some you cannot even imagine. In a paper published on Monday in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope studied 37 nearby dwarf galaxies and found that much of the oxygen they expected to find was missing.

In fact, these galaxies retained just 11% of the oxygen their stars had produced over time. The rest appears to have been blown out into space, leaving astronomers with a rather interesting mystery to solve.What are dwarf galaxies?Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies containing anywhere between a few thousand and hundreds of millions of stars.

This is considerably smaller than our Milky Way, which is estimated to contain around 100–400 billion stars. The Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that closely orbits the Milky Way and contains billions of stars, is one example of a dwarf galaxy, although its classification has occasionally been debated.Despite their smaller size, dwarf galaxies are important to astronomers because they offer clues about how galaxies form and evolve.