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The newest galaxy to be discovered is actually very old – and very small. And it's right in our neighborhood of the universe.

Although Kks3 is only 7 million light years away (about 2.5 times farther than our nearest large galaxy, Andromeda) at just 1/10,000 the stellar mass of our the Milky Way, it is tiny by galactic standards and incredibly easy to miss. About 2/3rds of the "dwarf spheroidal galaxy" is made up of star material formed 12 billion years ago, just a billion years and some change after the Big Bang.

The find was published in the latest issue of Monthly Notices Letters of the Royal Astronomical Society.

According to Sci-News.com, dwarf spheroidal galaxies such as Kks3 "have an absence of the raw materials needed for new generations of stars to form, leaving behind older and fainter relics. In almost every case, these raw materials seem to have been stripped out by nearby massive galaxies like Andromeda, so the vast majority of dSph objects are found near much bigger companions."

Another dwarf spheroidal galaxy even nearer to us, KKR 25, was found in 1999 to be orbiting the Milky Way at an average distance of about 50,000 light years.

According to the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), dwarf spheroidals are probably the most common galaxies in the universe. "Despite their low luminosity, they may contain large amounts of dark matter, and thus contribute greatly to the mass of the Universe," NED says.

Dmitry Makarov from the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Karachai-Cherkessia and an author on the paper announcing Kks3's discovery, says finding such objects is extremely challenging even with space-based telescopes such as Hubble.

"But with persistence, we're slowly building up a map of our local neighborhood, which turns out to be less empty than we thought," Makarov tells the Royal Astronomical Society. "It may be that are a huge number of [dwarf spheroidal galaxies] out there, something that would have profound consequences for our ideas about the evolution of the cosmos."

galaxies

space

When Dr. Ian Crozier arrived in West Africa this past summer, he was stepping into the epicenter of the Ebola hot zone. The American doctor was working in the Ebola ward of a large, public hospital in Sierra Leone's dusty city of Kenema.

The trip nearly cost him his life. First came a fever, then a severe headache. "My first thought was, 'Oh, I must have missed a few days of my malaria prophylaxis,' " Crozier recalls.

A day and a half later, Crozier was medevaced to Atlanta and admitted to Emory University Hospital's isolation unit. He had come down with Ebola. And although he had enough strength to walk into Emory, his condition went downhill fast — to the point where he needed life support.

Crozier had landed at the Kenema Government Hospital at a time when the facility was on the verge of collapse. The lead doctor had just died of Ebola. Several nurses had also succumbed.

The Ebola ward was overflowing with sick, dying and dead patients. Patients were throwing up on the floor. Bed pans couldn't get emptied fast enough. The number of new patients was increasing by the day, but many staff members were too afraid to show up for work.

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The Ebola Survivor Who Works In An Ebola Ward

"I think most of us who've spent time on the isolation wards anywhere in the region will tell you that nothing really prepares you for the realities of treating patients back there," Crozier says.

He says the virus behaved unlike any other he'd seen before: "The best word I can think of is 'aggression.' "

The disease comes on with a fever spike and then doubles the patient over with vomiting and diarrhea. Ebola robs people of their dignity, Crozier says. Patients become so weak that they can't lift themselves out of bed; they're left lying in their own stool and vomit.

"Then shortly after that particularly ominous predictor of death — at least in my experience — patients become somewhat vacant," he says. "This can range from mild confusion to delirium."

"Many patients on the ward are out of their minds in a sense," he adds.

Soon after Crozier's arrival at Kenema, Ebola struck head nurse Nancy Yoko.

"She was the glue that kept the nurses, many of whom were struggling to deal with the deaths of many of their colleagues, together," Crozier says. "She was a remarkable woman. And she was exhausted. She'd been there for months and months."

After having relied on her to help keep the ward running, Crozier then had to admit Yoko to the ward. He cared for her as she deteriorated. Not long after, he was mourning with the rest of the staff when she died.

“ "Most of us who've spent time on the isolation wards ... will tell you that nothing really prepares you for the realities of treating patients back there."

- Dr. Ian Crozier, an American doctor who survived Ebola

Things got so bad on the ward that eventually it was shut down. The government would start a new Ebola isolation unit in tents outside the hospital. But not before Crozier also got infected.

Crozier remembers making rounds in the ward one morning in September when the symptoms of Ebola began. He aborted his rounds, notified the team and isolated himself in his hotel room.

He was eventually sent to Emory, but Crozier doesn't remember what happened after stepping through the hospital doors.

"When Ian arrived at Emory, he sort of seemed to ... think he was still in Sierra Leone," says Dr. Colleen Kraft, who was part of the Emory team that treated Crozier.

Crozier was the third Ebola patient treated at Emory, and he would become the sickest. Within five days, he was on life support, and Kraft says it was unclear whether he'd make it.

"He was on dialysis; his kidneys had failed. He was on mechanical ventilation," Kraft says. "And because of his confusion early on we weren't sure about his neurologic status."

He also had severe hepatitis. "So right there you have many organs that had failed," adds Kraft.

Crozier knows that if he hadn't been evacuated, he would have been dead a week later. "That's obviously a difficult thing for me to think and talk about," he says.

The doctors at Emory managed to keep him alive even as Ebola wreaked havoc inside his body. He was given an experimental Ebola drug and a blood plasma transfusion from an Ebola survivor.

While he was on life support, his illness finally turned the corner. His immune system started making antibodies to kill the virus. Rather than going up, his viral load started to go down. And 40 days after he walked into Emory, Ian Crozier walked out Ebola-free.

He's incredibly thankful to the staff at Emory who cared for him, and to the U.S. State Department for jetting him out of West Africa. But he also is very aware that he was lucky and that many of his patients back in Sierra Leone aren't as fortunate.

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"Do I wish my patients that I'd been with just a few days before had access to that type of critical care?" he says. "Absolutely. Absolutely."

Crozier was released from Emory on Oct. 19. He's still recuperating from the near fatal illness but hopes to eventually go back to West Africa and treat Ebola patients.

"I think I have a new understanding of what it's like to be an Ebola patient," he says. "That will be a gift in not just in thinking about the technical aspects of people's care but how to lend them some dignity in those isolation wards."

Like many other Ebola survivors, Crozier still suffers from extreme fatigue and has some swelling that's causing eye problems. His doctors at Emory say they simply don't know how long it will take for him to make a full recovery, but they're confident he will.

survivor

Emory University Hospital

ebola

On fiction as catharsis

Writing, for me — and story for the human race — is very much an attempt to make sense out of things that are basically senseless. Story is also a way to feel like we had control over the world. I feel like we struggled a lot after my daughter's death with the sense that every time my children left the house that they could die at any moment. And just that anybody that I knew could die at any moment and coming to terms with that. ... I think religious people try to cover up that truth by saying, "Well, everything happens according to God's plan." And I think Linda [the main character in the book] finds a way to mesh those two that I am still working on personally. She feels like there can still be random events and God can still exist without necessarily him planning for those things to happen. That's not what her belief in God is for. It's not to give her a false sense of control. But that was what I really had used God for, and when I lost that I couldn't figure out how to believe in God again.

On how she expects the Mormon community to react to this book

I worried that Mormons will feel like the story is pointing a finger at them, trying to expose the worst parts of Mormonism, and I don't really mean it to be taken in that way. ... I feel like a lot of the problems that are in Mormonism exist everywhere but they do have a different meaning within Mormonism — I think we talk about those problems in a different way. I've heard some feedback from a few Mormons who have been unhappy with the book — one person said that I had an agenda and that she felt like that agenda was very anti-men. I've been puzzling over that because I feel like there are so many really great men in the book. Kurt, the bishop himself, is, I think, a great man. And then Brad Ferris, who comes up later in the book, is another really, really solid man.

But yeah, there are bad male characters and there are bad female characters. I think that for Mormons they're used to seeing Mormons depicted either only as all bad, and then there are the Mormon books that are written for a Mormon audience and then the Mormons are all good in those books. ... And I am treating Mormons as someone looking at Mormonism from an anthropological perspective almost and I'm not giving them a pass. I have to admit, I'm a little nervous about my particular ward's reaction to the book when it comes out.

Read an excerpt of The Bishop's Wife

It is, perhaps, the worst nightmare for those of us constantly trying to get a white dominated Hollywood to widen its doors of opportunity for people of color: all those executives who say the right things in public and give to the right causes, just might think something much less admirable about diversity behind closed doors.

This seems the surface lesson of the emails unearthed by hackers into Sony's computer records. I haven't seen the stolen emails or any of the other data hacked from Sony's computers. My thoughts are based on what I've read and heard about emails whose content Sony has not disputed.

And many of those reports detail racially insensitive — okay, Shonda Rhimes, you're right — let's just call them racist — jokes between studio executive Amy Pascal and movie producer Scott Rudin. Their reported emails read like they were cribbed from an old Larry Sanders Show episode, with the pair sounding like caricatures of clueless, racially oblivious fat cats.

Small wonder Pascal reached out to the media's highest-profile advocates on issues involving racism, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson "to discuss a healing process," as she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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Rev. Al Sharpton, left, and Marc Morial president of the National Urban League, speak to reporters after they met with Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal, on Dec. 18. Mark Lennihan/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Mark Lennihan/AP

Rev. Al Sharpton, left, and Marc Morial president of the National Urban League, speak to reporters after they met with Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal, on Dec. 18.

Mark Lennihan/AP

After meeting with Pascal, Sharpton said, "The climate and environment of Hollywood only confirms the type of language that was used in those emails." At a post-meeting press conference, a coalition of civil rights groups pledged to work with her and Sony. Sharpton also tweeted that the emails "show a cultural blindness," though he didn't call for Pascal to step down.

What these emails really reveal is how little Hollywood is willing to challenge the basic structures, practices and thinking which make it such a white-dominated industry. This seems to happen even when there's evidence that breaking down those walls will actually make better films and more money.

Consider the Golden Globe award nominees. Last year, thanks to films like 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, Captain Phillips and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, there were a wealth of non-white actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters nominated for top awards in film.

This year, there are eight non-white Golden Globe nominees in major acting and directing categories across TV and movies. Films prominently featuring black people like Belle, Beyond the Lights, Top 5 and Dear White People were overlooked; Selma, the feature film on Martin Luther King Jr., got two of the three nominations for non-white people in film.

It's as if the lessons of last year — where diverse casts, writers and directors produced some of the most exciting work of the season — went unheeded when studio big shots like Pascal and Rudin were deciding what gets made and doesn't in 2014. (In a year where Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars in both Belle and Beyond the Lights, how she didn't get nominated for something is beyond me.)

In the Globes' television nominees, there is even less excuse. ABC's Black-ish garnered a load of rave reviews and good ratings, but was shut out of the Globes nominations. There were two well-deserved nominations for The CW's Jane the Virgin, a Latino-centered comedy that was also well-reviewed and beloved by critics. But the absence of Black-ish left a sense that only one minority-centered comedy could make the cut, despite the fact that both shows were among the fall's best new comedies.

Viola Davis snagged a Globe nomination as TV's best dramatic actress for her role on ABC's How to Get Away With Murder. Last year, Kerry Washington was nominated for her work on ABC's Scandal; Washington's lack of nomination this year also leads to questions about whether only one black woman can nab such an honor in a given year.

It all reminds me of something I noticed when The Hollywood Reporter featured a powerful essay from comic Chris Rock on how white people and white culture dominate Hollywood. It was published in the run up to the release of Rock's film, Top Five.

He talks about how Los Angeles is filled with Latinos but somehow none of them wind up in powerful positions at Hollywood studios; how black comic Kevin Hart is pressured to cross over, even though he draws more than ten times the audience of white Daily Show host Jon Stewart at standup concerts; and how black women almost never get meaningful roles in non-black oriented films.

But in the same issue, there is a roundtable of six actors from films which the magazine thinks will contend for an Oscar. All of them are white. Weeks earlier, the magazine had a roundtable with seven actresses from similarly well-regarded films. All of them were white, despite powerful performances in films mentioned above, like Selma and Beyond the Lights, Belle, Black or White, Dear White People and even Annie.

When I asked The Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min about this, she said the films this year with non-white stars either weren't considered serious Oscar contenders or, like Selma, weren't available for screening when the magazine made its roundtable choices.

Last year, the magazine had similar a roundtable including three non-white actresses. But because they couldn't stretch their rules to consider the one film featuring black people which has serious awards season buzz, they missed out on including Golden Globe nominee David Oyelowo, star of Selma, in their actor panel.

Clockwise from far left, Patricia Arquette, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Amy Adams, Felicity Jones, Julianne Moore and Hilary Swank on November 28 cover of The Hollywood Reporter. The Hollywood Reporter hide caption

itoggle caption The Hollywood Reporter

This seems a prime example of how even institutions that take a close look at Hollywood's issues with race can also reinforce those problems by sticking with old habits and established practices.

Pascal has pushed back against those who suggest the leaked emails should cost her the chairman's job at Sony, saying the messages "are not an accurate reflection of who I am."

I believe her. But I also believe these messages are an accurate reflection of Hollywood's attitudes about diversity, where assumptions are made without proof and even the president can find himself at the butt end of a racist joke between the most powerful people in town.

The best way bigshots like Pascal and Rudin can prove they aren't the people depicted in these emails is to challenge the status quo and insist on results. Break down any rule or practice that hinders bringing more diversity to executive suites, producing and directing ranks, and casting offices.

Yes, there are some people of color who are doing well in Hollywood, particularly Latino filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Inarritu, Jorge Gutierrez and Alfonso Cuaron. But they still seem like notable exceptions.

It's time to ensure that the meeting with Sharpton isn't job-saving window dressing, but a real step toward making Hollywood's releases look more like America.

Because, frankly, if they had been doing a great job breaking down barriers in the first place, then Pascal wouldn't have to call Sharpton and Jackson to assure the world she's not a racist.