UC Riverside-led study finds extreme tidal mass loss in dwarf galaxies formed in a simulation Author: Iqbal Pittalwala
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A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Riverside, has found that some dwarf galaxies may today appear to be dark-matter free even though they formed as galaxies dominated by dark matter in the past.
Galaxies that appear to have little to no dark matter nonluminous material thought to constitute 85% of matter in the universe complicate astronomers’ understanding of the universe’s dark matter content. Such galaxies, which have recently been found in observations, challenge a cosmological model used by astronomers called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or LCDM, where all galaxies are surrounded by a massive and extended dark matter halo.
Using the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) space observatory and CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), astronomers have spotted a 49-million-light-year-long intercluster filament in the merging galaxy cluster system Abell 3391-Abell 3395, confirming current ‘Big Bang’ ideas about the origin and evolution of the Universe.
Simulation showing the distribution of hot gas (left), compared with the eROSITA X-ray image (right) of the Abell 3391-Abell 3395 system. Image credit: Reiprich
et al., doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/202039590.
“More than half of the matter in our Universe has so far remained hidden from us,” said University of Bonn’s Professor Thomas Reiprich and colleagues.