Enlarge / Astronomers mapped out the celebs (proven right here in blue) and gasoline (inexperienced) of the unusual galaxy often known as AGC 114905. (credit score: Javier Román and Pavel Mancera Piña)
Three years in the past, Filippo Fraternali and his colleagues noticed a half dozen mysteriously diffuse galaxies, which regarded like sprawling cities of stars and gasoline. However in contrast to virtually each different galaxy ever seen—together with our personal Milky Approach—they didn’t appear to be enshrouded in large plenty of darkish matter, which might usually maintain these stellar metropolises along with their gravity. The scientists picked one to zoom in on, a modest-sized galaxy about 250,000 light-years away, and so they pointed the 27 radio telescope antennas of the Very Giant Array in New Mexico at it.
After gathering 40 hours’ value of information, they mapped out the celebs and gasoline and confirmed what the sooner snapshots had hinted at: “The darkish matter content material that we infer on this galaxy is way, a lot smaller than what you’ll anticipate,” says Fraternali, an astronomer at Kapteyn Astronomical Institute of the College of Groningen within the Netherlands. If the workforce or their opponents discover different such galaxies, it may pose a problem for scientists’ view of darkish matter, the dominant perspective within the area for no less than 20 years. Fraternali and his workforce printed their findings in December within the Month-to-month Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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