ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Low surface brightness galaxy

A low surface brightness galaxy is like a very faint ghost in the sky that is hard to see. Imagine looking up at the sky on a dark night and seeing a few bright stars. Now imagine if there were stars that were very dim and spread out, making it hard to see them. These low surface brightness galaxies are like those dim stars.

These galaxies are not only hard to see, but they also have very little mass and are made up mostly of gas and dust. This means that they don't have a strong gravitational pull to hold everything together. They also don't have many bright stars or star clusters, which are what scientists use to find galaxies.

To make things even more complicated, low surface brightness galaxies are also often very big, which means they can be spread out over a large area. This makes it even harder to see them compared to smaller and brighter galaxies.

Scientists are very interested in studying these low surface brightness galaxies because they can tell us a lot about the universe and how it formed. They can also teach us more about dark matter, which is a mysterious substance we can't see but makes up most of the matter in the universe.

In summary, low surface brightness galaxies are like very faint ghosts in the sky that are hard to see. They are made up mostly of gas and dust, have very little mass, and don't have many bright stars or star clusters. Even though they are hard to see, they are important to study because they can tell us a lot about the universe and dark matter.
Related topics others have asked about: