Update: The study's authors have provided us with a link to a free .pdf version of the full paper!
In a revolutionary development, a team of astronomers has discovered that a faint smudge of a galaxy called NGC1052-DF2 (or DF2, for short) may have no dark matter at all; the group's results show that DF2 has less dark matter than predicted by a factor of at least 400. That’s a big deal. Astronomers have never seen a galaxy like this before, and it raises intriguing questions about galaxies and dark matter.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 30 times more dark matter than ordinary matter. Ordinary matter is relatively easy to define: It’s all of the “stuff” in the universe made of atoms—animals, plants, planets, stars, gas, dust, etc. Dark matter is much more elusive. No one knows exactly what it is, but there is strong evidence that undetected matter of some kind exists, has mass, and interacts with ordinary matter through gravity, playing a crucial role in holding galaxies like ours together.
Enter this discovery. Yale University’s Pieter van Dokkum is the lead author of the new research paper, which appears in this week’s issue of Nature. He is also one of the leaders of the Dragonfly Telescope Array. Dragonfly is sensitive to objects that appear very faint in the visible region of the spectrum. When comparing Dragonfly images to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, his team realized that DF2 was peculiar. In Dragonfly images, the object had size and structure, but in data from the Survey, the same area looked more like a collection of pinpoints of light than a typical galaxy.
After conducting follow-up observations, van Dokkum and colleagues at San Jose State University, University of Toronto, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics concluded that DF2 is a strange galaxy. It’s about the size of the Milky Way, but has only 1/200th the number of stars. That gives it a kind of ghost-like appearance—you can see other galaxies through it. DF2 doesn’t have a dense central region like most spiral galaxies, or a central black hole like most elliptical galaxies. There are ten bright clusters of stars in the galaxy, but they orbit the center of the galaxy much slower than expected.
The researchers calculated the mass of the galaxy using two different methods. The methods agreed with one another—but not with predictions based on our current understanding of galaxies. The ordinary matter (also called baryonic matter) in DF2 accounted for the entire mass of the galaxy. “We conclude that NGC1052–DF2 is extremely deficient in dark matter, and a good candidate for a ‘baryonic galaxy’ with no dark matter at all,” write the researchers in the Nature paper.
Wow. So what does that mean? In a statement, van Dokkum put it this way, “It challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies work. This result also suggests that there may be more than one way to form a galaxy.” Previously, most astronomers assumed that galaxies were an intertwined mixture of ordinary matter and dark matter. Now it seems that isn’t necessarily true.
This finding also raises serious questions about the formation of galaxies. Research suggests that dark matter is key to the formation of galaxies. Is there another mechanism for galaxy formation that we don’t know about? Did DF2 once contain dark matter, and then somehow lose it in a violent cosmic event? Is DF2 a mutant due to its proximity to a much more dominant galaxy, NGC 1042? Or is DF2 not that unusual at all, just the first of many dark matter-deficient galaxies to be discovered? Dragonfly has seen other objects that look similar to DF2, says van Dokkum, but they haven’t been investigated yet.
There’s another interesting aspect of this discovery. Although it calls into question some of what we know about galaxies and dark matter, this new discovery could end up strengthening the case for dark matter in the end. Most astronomers—but not all—agree that there is some kind of dark matter in the universe. Some have offered competing theories to explain the observations often considered evidence of dark matter, such as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). However, MOND and some other alternative theories don't offer predictions of galaxies that appear not to have dark matter.
Some discoveries resolve a lot of existing questions. Not this one...but that just makes it more exciting! Dark matter has always been a mysterious creature. Wherever this finding leads, you can be sure that it will be interesting—and that Physics Buzz will here to bring you the story.
—Kendra Redmond
In a revolutionary development, a team of astronomers has discovered that a faint smudge of a galaxy called NGC1052-DF2 (or DF2, for short) may have no dark matter at all; the group's results show that DF2 has less dark matter than predicted by a factor of at least 400. That’s a big deal. Astronomers have never seen a galaxy like this before, and it raises intriguing questions about galaxies and dark matter.
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| A Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy NGC1052-DF2. Distant galaxies are visible through DF2 due to its lack of stars and “ghostly” nature. Image Credit: P. van Dokkum; R. Abraham; STScI, Space Telescope Science Institute. |
Enter this discovery. Yale University’s Pieter van Dokkum is the lead author of the new research paper, which appears in this week’s issue of Nature. He is also one of the leaders of the Dragonfly Telescope Array. Dragonfly is sensitive to objects that appear very faint in the visible region of the spectrum. When comparing Dragonfly images to data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, his team realized that DF2 was peculiar. In Dragonfly images, the object had size and structure, but in data from the Survey, the same area looked more like a collection of pinpoints of light than a typical galaxy.
 |
| The Dragonfly team of Roberto Abraham (far left), Pieter van Dokkum (far right), and University of Toronto and Yale graduate students pose with one half of the Dragonfly array at its home site in New Mexico. Image Credit: Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. |
The researchers calculated the mass of the galaxy using two different methods. The methods agreed with one another—but not with predictions based on our current understanding of galaxies. The ordinary matter (also called baryonic matter) in DF2 accounted for the entire mass of the galaxy. “We conclude that NGC1052–DF2 is extremely deficient in dark matter, and a good candidate for a ‘baryonic galaxy’ with no dark matter at all,” write the researchers in the Nature paper.
Wow. So what does that mean? In a statement, van Dokkum put it this way, “It challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies work. This result also suggests that there may be more than one way to form a galaxy.” Previously, most astronomers assumed that galaxies were an intertwined mixture of ordinary matter and dark matter. Now it seems that isn’t necessarily true.
This finding also raises serious questions about the formation of galaxies. Research suggests that dark matter is key to the formation of galaxies. Is there another mechanism for galaxy formation that we don’t know about? Did DF2 once contain dark matter, and then somehow lose it in a violent cosmic event? Is DF2 a mutant due to its proximity to a much more dominant galaxy, NGC 1042? Or is DF2 not that unusual at all, just the first of many dark matter-deficient galaxies to be discovered? Dragonfly has seen other objects that look similar to DF2, says van Dokkum, but they haven’t been investigated yet.
There’s another interesting aspect of this discovery. Although it calls into question some of what we know about galaxies and dark matter, this new discovery could end up strengthening the case for dark matter in the end. Most astronomers—but not all—agree that there is some kind of dark matter in the universe. Some have offered competing theories to explain the observations often considered evidence of dark matter, such as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). However, MOND and some other alternative theories don't offer predictions of galaxies that appear not to have dark matter.
Some discoveries resolve a lot of existing questions. Not this one...but that just makes it more exciting! Dark matter has always been a mysterious creature. Wherever this finding leads, you can be sure that it will be interesting—and that Physics Buzz will here to bring you the story.
—Kendra Redmond
Dark matter fills 'empty' space, strongly interacts with visible matter and is displaced by visible matter.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for the 'missing dark matter' is that the galaxy is so diffuse that it doesn't displace the dark matter outward and away from the galaxy to the degree that the dark matter is able to push back and cause the stars far away from the galactic center to speed up.
It's not that there is no dark matter connected to and neighboring the visible matter. It's that the galaxy is not well defined enough to displace the dark matter to such an extent that it forms a 'halo' around the galaxy.
A galaxy's halo is not a clump of dark matter traveling with the galaxy. A galaxy's halo is the state of displacement of the dark matter.
Reasonable explanation
ReplyDelete... waiting for the day that the nature of Dark Matter is known!
ReplyDeleteDark matter like/as the fabric of space-time is present everywhere in the universe and as such in all galaxies. Newton said that the masses of spherical objects like planets, stars etc, and which also includes spherical dark matter halos could be considered as concentrated at their centres or contre of mass(CM). In the case of a dark matter halo, a black hole at its centre is evidence for this. The amount of dark matter 'warped up' into this dark matter halo depends on or is directly proportional to the mass of the black hole at its centre. So "mass tells space-time how to curve and space-time tells mass how to move."
ReplyDeleteA critical mass-radius ratio is required to be able warp space-time fabric into a halo in space-time, which all black holes pass.
The entire dark matter halo behaves as though it were a particle or body by itself like a planet.
This way it is not difficult to observe galactic rotation curves within dark matter halos but have Keplerian interactions with other masses outside them (dark matter halos). The amount of dark matter in #DF2 is proportional to the mass at its Galactic centre. And so we may not or cannot comfortably rule out the presence of dark matter in #DF2. But great work done
No Matthias, you will never find dark matter in the empty spaces between galaxies, (interstellar space), period.
Delete'Dark Matter' is nothing more than virtual particles, (specifically, 1/2 of a virtual pair that managed to escape from the super massive black hole, (SMB), in the center of the galaxy). Heisneberg's Uncertainty Principle allows for this to occur in tremendous volumes from the so-called 'singularity' that is supposed to exist at the bottom of the gravity well. Having escaped the confines of the 'singularity', the massive amounts of virtual particles propagate out into the outer reaches of the galaxy and produce the gravitational anomalies that are observed.
Virtual particles only interact with normal matter through gravity and there is a virtual sea of them imbedded within the galactic disc. The only unknown in this hypothesis is this: Do these virtual particles actually constitute what we know as gravity? Or are the virtual particles merely mimicking the effects of gravity?
We can 'image' dark matter halos around virtually every know galaxy that is know to have a SMB at its center. So the hypothesis is refined to this; dark matter or even cold dark matter can only exist when there is a SMB present in the galaxy's core.
Testing this required finding a galaxy such as NGC1052-DF2 (or DF2, for short) that has no apparent dark matter and then verifying that it also lacks the requisite SMB. This has already been verified - DF2 has no central SMB like most elliptical galaxies
No Matthias. Dark Matter has never be found in interstellar space, (the empty space between galaxies). It can only exist as a halo imbedded within a galaxy.
Delete'Dark Matter' is nothing more than virtual particles, (specifically, 1/2 of a virtual pair that managed to escape from the super massive black hole, (SMB), in the center of the galaxy). Heisneberg's Uncertainty Principle allows for this to occur in tremendous volumes from the so-called 'singularity' that is supposed to exist at the bottom of the gravity well. Having escaped the confines of the 'singularity', the massive amounts of virtual particles propagate out into the outer reaches of the galaxy and produce the gravitational anomalies that are observed.
Virtual particles only interact with normal matter through gravity and there is a virtual sea of them imbedded within the galactic disc. The only unknown in this hypothesis is this: Do these virtual particles actually constitute what we know as gravity? Or are the virtual particles merely mimicking the effects of gravity?
We can 'image' dark matter halos around virtually every know galaxy that is know to have a SMB at its center. So the hypothesis is refined to this; dark matter or even cold dark matter can only exist when there is a SMB present in the galaxy's core.
Testing this required finding a galaxy such as NGC1052-DF2 (or DF2, for short) that has no apparent dark matter and then verifying that it also lacks the requisite SMB. This has already been verified - DF2 has no central SMB like most elliptical galaxies
Imagine I believe this galaxy is 10 billion + years old. Likely many intelligent civilizations developing. In that time even slower than light travel could span the galaxy. What if they discovered a use for dark matter? Maybe for travel or power or whatever. A billion years or so of a galaxy spanning civilization would drastically decrease it overall.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, and this is only speculation, the reason that it is so diffuse is that it contains so little dark matter. The real questions are 1) whether and how it formed somehow with so little dark matter or whether there is some process that actively removed most of the original dark matter.
ReplyDelete