Holmberg IX is a dwarf irregular galaxy and a satellite galaxy

Satellite galaxy

A satellite galaxy orbits a larger galaxy due to gravitational attraction. Although a galaxy is made of a large number of objects which are not connected to each other, it has a center of mass, which represents a weighted average of the positions of each component object...

 of M81

Messier 81

Messier 81 is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Due to its proximity to Earth, large size and active galactic nucleus Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa...

. The galaxy is named

Galaxies named after people

A small number of galaxies or galaxy groups have been named after individual people. In most cases, the named individual was the person who discovered the object, who first brought attention to it, or who first studied it scientifically....

 after Erik Holmberg who first described it. Based on the observed age distribution of stars it contains it is thought to have formed within the last 200 Myr

Myr

The symbol myr was formerly used in English-language geology, and remains as the standard usage in astronomy, as a unit of one million years.It is an abbreviation for 'million years' and lower case is used in geology, while upper case is used in astronomy....

 making it the youngest nearby galaxy

Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...

. It is also home to one of two newly discovered yellow supergiant eclipsing binary systems.

External links

• M81's satellite galaxy Holmberg IX
• Holmberg IX: XMM1
• GALEX Completes Four Star-Studded Years in Space
• Dwarf Galaxy Holmberg IX