![]() Euclid mission: ESA's hunt for dark matter and dark energy We have never seen dark matter and dark energy. 'Hidden' photons could shed light on mysterious dark matter The team isn't totally satisfied with either explanation and will, therefore, continue investigating NGC 1277 with the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary Island of La Palma. ![]() "The other is that the dark matter was driven out of the system when the galaxy formed by the merging of protogalactic fragments, which gave rise to the relic galaxy." "One is that the gravitational interaction with the surrounding medium within the galaxy cluster in which this galaxy is situated has stripped out the dark matter," team member and University of La Laguna researcher Anna Ferré-Mateu. The scientists behind this revelation have a few ideas about why NGC 1277 is so deficient in dark matter. Kehusma/NASA/ESA) Where did relic galaxy's dark matter go? Beasley(Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias)/P. Zoomed-out Hubble view of NGC 1277, which lies near the center of the Perseus cluster of over 1,000 galaxies, located 240 million light-years away from Earth. "This discrepancy between the observations and what we would expect is a puzzle, and maybe even a challenge for the standard model," team member and University of La Laguna researcher Ignacio Trujillo said. This is surprising, as the currently favored models of cosmic evolution including the standard model of cosmology, suggest NGC 1277 should be comprised of between 10% and 70% dark matter. ![]() That means that within the galaxy's radius, there can't be a dark matter content any greater than 5%, but the findings are more consistent with a complete absence of dark matter in NGC 1277. This revealed that the distribution of NGC 1277's total mass - which should include dark matter - was the same as the distribution of the mass of its everyday matter contents, in other words, stars, dust, gas and planets. This allowed them to map the motion of the galaxy and determine its mass and how that mass is distributed. To assist in this line of inquiry, Comerón and colleagues observed the relic galaxy NGC 1277 with an instrument called an integral field spectrograph. As such, these relic galaxies are essential in helping astronomers to understand how the first galaxies formed. ![]() Galaxies like this are considered to be the remains of giant galaxies that existed in the early universe. Examining an anti-social relic galaxyĬonsidered a cosmic relic, NGC 1277 is unusual among galaxies because it has had little interaction with other surrounding galaxies. But the discovery of a galaxy that appears to haven no dark matter challenges that assumption. This fact resulted in scientists theorizing that all large galaxies are wrapped in an envelope of dark matter, and this has become an important assumption in the development of theories of galactic evolution. ![]()
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