A galaxy missing its dark matter

• Autores: Leah Crane
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3172, 2018, pág. 16
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • There is a strange, distant galaxy that seems to be missing something big: dark matter. When Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University and his colleagues measured the total mass for a galaxy called NGC 1052-DF2 that is some 65 million light years away, they found that it probably has no dark matter at all. In some galaxies, dark matter hides towards the edges. But "in this particular galaxy, because it's so big and diffuse, there's nowhere for the dark matter to hide", van Dokkum says. The team found that DF2 is about 340 million times the mass of the sun. That is an upper limit, so there is a 90 per cent chance that it is smaller. The mass of the stars in DF2 is between about 100 million and 300 million solar masses.