How can this be possible?
Dark matter is everywhere in the universe. It is believed that it is hairy. It is a fundamental part of the space. And recently, astronomers made an unexpected discovery: a galaxy that has virtually no dark matter.
It is the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2, which is 6.5 billion light years away from the Milky Way and has baffled the authors of a study published in Nature because this galaxy has much less dark matter than that should have for its size.
Speaking with Space.com, Yale researcher Pieter van Dokkum explained that for a galaxy with a star mass of 200 million solar masses, the "normal" would be 80 billion solar masses of dark matter.
However, the discovered galaxy has only 300 million solar masses.
The discovery may involve a change in what the scientists believed, as indicated by Professor Roberto Abraham - a co-author of the study - on the University of Toronto website:
Before, we believed that galaxies were composed of stars, gases and dark matter, all mixed together. But dark matter was the majority.
Now, it seems that at least some galaxies exist with many stars and gases, and little dark matter. Which is pretty bizarre.
The strange galaxy has a size similar to that of our Milky Way, although with a small difference: it has 200 times less stars. How the NGC 1052-DF2 was formed remains a mystery, although astronomers intend to continue studying it through the Hubble telescope.
Astronomy will never cease to amaze