Ursa Major III

Ursa Major III
Ursa Major III
Observation data ( Half-light radius (apparent)
Other designations
	UMa III, UNIONS 1

Location of Ursa Major III, a dwarf satellite galaxy near the Milky Way

Ursa Major III (UMa III) is a

Keck Observatory

's Deep Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS), which has 64 megapixels of resolution.

Ursa Major III's discovery was announced in November 2023, with a paper appearing in The Astrophysical Journal in January 2024. It contains a metal-poor stellar population, indicating an extreme age of 11 billion years. Located about 32,600 light years away, it has a diameter of just 19.6 light years and is thought to contain only about 60 stars. Combined with its absolute magnitude of only +2.2, this makes it by far the Milky Way's dimmest satellite, and only about as bright as Altair. This absolute magnitude corresponds to a stellar mass of 16 M_☉.^[1]

Ursa Major III is predicted to have a mass-to-light ratio of about 6,500. However, this becomes only 1,900 with the removal of one of the stars suspected to be part of the galaxy. This very high value indicates the presence of a massive dark matter halo, indicating that Ursa Major III is indeed a true dwarf galaxy, albeit one with an extremely low stellar mass.^[1] As Ursa Major III's total luminosity is approximately 11.4 L_☉ its total mass is probably only about 74,000 M_☉, which would make it one of the least massive galaxies known.