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Another Galaxy Weirdly Appears to Have No Dark Matter - Gizmodo

Another Galaxy Weirdly Appears to Have No Dark Matter - Gizmodo

Another Galaxy Weirdly Appears to Have No Dark Matter - Gizmodo
Dec 07, 2021 1 min, 11 secs

But a team of researchers say they’ve found a distant galaxy entirely devoid of dark matter, a finding that could shake up understandings of both dark matter and galaxy formation.

In the recent case, though, a team of astrophysicists tried to observe dark matter’s effects on the gas rotating within a distant dwarf galaxy, but they found that normal matter alone could explain the gas’s movement.

Filippo Fraternali, an astrophysicist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and a co-author of the paper, told Gizmodo in an email that the galaxy the team studied could be held together only by its visible mass—which sounds perfectly reasonable, except that dark matter is believed to be a major ingredient in all galaxies.

“The main problem is that, in our scenario of galaxy formation, galaxies cannot form without dark matter, and even more so, dwarf galaxies should have large amounts of it,” Fraternali said.

One explanation for the absence was that the galaxy had been stripped of its dark matter by large galaxies nearby—except there were no such galaxies around it.

Another theory was that the angle at which the team observed the galaxy made the dark matter hard to see, but co-author Tom Oosterloo, an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, noted in the same release that the actual angle would be pretty extreme as compared to the team’s estimate.

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