(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands found no traces of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905, despite the fact that the group carried out very detailed measurements over 40 hours using modern telescopes.
When Pavel Mancera Piña of the University of Groningen and the ASTRON Institute of Radio Astronomy in the Netherlands and his colleagues discovered six galaxies with little or no dark matter, they were told that “if you measure again, you can see that there is still dark matter around galaxies ”. However, after 40 hours of detailed observations of one of the galaxies carried out using the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory located in New Mexico, USA, astronomers have only confirmed their earlier results.
This galaxy, AGC 114905, is about 250 million light-years away. It belongs to the class of superdiffuse dwarf galaxies and is about the size of the Milky Way, although it contains a thousand times fewer stars. According to the widespread point of view, the existence of superdiffuse dwarf galaxies can be explained only by drawing on the concept of dark matter.
The researchers collected data on the rotation of gas in the galaxy AGC 114905 for 40 hours between July and October 2020 using the VLA telescope. Based on the results of these measurements, a graph was built in the coordinates of gas velocity – distance from the center of the galaxy. This method is the standard method for detecting the presence of dark matter. The plotted graph showed that the movement of gas in the galaxy AGC 114905 can be fully explained by the gravitational influence of ordinary matter.
“Of course, we thought and hoped that these measurements would confirm our previous hypotheses,” said Pavel Mansera Pina. But now the problem is that, according to the theory, there should be dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905, but in fact it is not there. And we even see that the discrepancy between theory and observation is only increasing. ”
One of the possible explanations for this absence of dark matter in the galaxy AGC 114905 is, according to the authors, that the assumed angle at which the galaxy is observed is very different from the true one, but the likelihood of this state of affairs seems to be rather low.
The work was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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