The scientific team, led by the researcher from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) Sébastien Comerón, has discovered that the galaxy NGC 1277 has no dark matter. The study is published in the specialized journal ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’.
This is the first time that a massive galaxy (with several times the mass of the Milky Way) has been discovered. with no evidence of this invisible component of the Universe in it. “This result has no place within the current paradigm of the cosmological model with dark matter,” explains Comerón.
The standard cosmological model postulates that massive galaxies contain large amounts of dark mattera type of matter that is transparent and does not interact with ordinary matter, but whose existence can be inferred from the gravitational attraction it exerts on stars and gas, which is observable.
NGC 1277 is known to be a prototype of ‘relic galaxy’that is, a galaxy that has not interacted with any other from her neighbors. These galaxies are extremely rare and are considered unevolved remnants of what were giant galaxies at the dawn of the Universe.
“The importance of relic galaxies for understand how the first galaxies formed was the reason why we decided to observe NGC 1277 with an integral field spectrograph”, says Comerón. “From these spectra, we obtained kinematic maps with which we reconstructed the mass distribution of the galaxy within a radius of about 20,000 light years“, Add.