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A vast cluster of dead galaxies roughly 300 million light-years from Earth may hold as much as 100 times more dark matter than visible matter, researchers say.
This discovery sheds light on how dark matter can shape the evolution of galaxies, scientists added.
Scientists analyzed 47 galaxies that fell into the Coma Cluster, one of the largest structures in the universe. Inside this cluster, thousands of galaxies are bound together by gravity in a space just 20 million light-years wide. (For comparison, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.) [Poll: Will Dark Matter Ever Be Explained?]
Although these 47 galaxies are about as large as the Milky Way, they surprisingly contain only 1 percent as many stars as our home galaxy — a discovery made last year by astronomers in the United States, Canada and Japan using the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico. This array of eight connected Canon telephoto lenses helped to detect extremely faint objects that conventional telescope surveys miss.
The gravitational pull of stars normally helps to hold galaxies together. However, these 47 galaxies are spread out extremely thin, making them highly vulnerable to getting ripped apart by the gravitational pull of other galaxies and dark matter within the cluster, the scientists found. Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to make up about 84 percent of the matter in the universe, and while dark matter is invisible, its presence can be inferred by its gravitational effects on visible matter.
Read more here. (Space)
This discovery sheds light on how dark matter can shape the evolution of galaxies, scientists added.
Scientists analyzed 47 galaxies that fell into the Coma Cluster, one of the largest structures in the universe. Inside this cluster, thousands of galaxies are bound together by gravity in a space just 20 million light-years wide. (For comparison, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.) [Poll: Will Dark Matter Ever Be Explained?]
Although these 47 galaxies are about as large as the Milky Way, they surprisingly contain only 1 percent as many stars as our home galaxy — a discovery made last year by astronomers in the United States, Canada and Japan using the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico. This array of eight connected Canon telephoto lenses helped to detect extremely faint objects that conventional telescope surveys miss.
The gravitational pull of stars normally helps to hold galaxies together. However, these 47 galaxies are spread out extremely thin, making them highly vulnerable to getting ripped apart by the gravitational pull of other galaxies and dark matter within the cluster, the scientists found. Dark matter is a mysterious substance thought to make up about 84 percent of the matter in the universe, and while dark matter is invisible, its presence can be inferred by its gravitational effects on visible matter.
Read more here. (Space)
