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Dark matter

Lumpy haloes spin faster

Nature volume 401, pages 27–28 (1999)Cite this article

More than 90% of the mass of the Universe is thought to be made up of dark matter. The density of this mysterious matter has been most precisely measured in the outer reaches of disk-shaped spiral galaxies, where very little light is emitted by stars. It is generally accepted that galaxies are surrounded by dark matter ‘haloes’ in which the visible galaxy is embedded, so helping to explain the rapid rotation of stars and gas far from the galactic centre. How much dark matter coexists with stars near the centre of galaxies is less certain, but numerical studies of the dynamics of bar-shaped galaxies have been used to impose an upper limit on the central dark-matter density1.

Tremaine and Ostriker2 now suggest in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that, because of an unexpectedly strong interaction with the galactic disk, dark haloes may have a rapidly spinning central bulge, similar to the stellar cores of galaxies. If this is true, it will come as a relief to advocates of the ‘cold dark matter’ (CDM) picture of the Universe, which predicts that many disk galaxies should be dominated by dark matter even at their centres.

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References

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  1. Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3NP, UK

    James Binney

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  1. James Binney
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Correspondence to James Binney.

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Binney, J. Lumpy haloes spin faster. Nature 401, 27–28 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/43336

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