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Astrophysics

Distant galaxies lack dark matter

Nature volume 543, pages 318–319 (2017)Cite this article

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The masses of nearby spiral galaxies are dominated by invisible 'dark matter'. Surprisingly, galaxies in the distant Universe seem to contain comparatively little of it. See Letter p.397

In the 1970s, astronomers discovered that stars in the outer parts of galaxies seem to be moving too fast for the gravity due to their observed mass to keep them in orbit1. The researchers therefore suggested that most of the mass in these outer regions must be invisible. This 'dark matter' now underpins much of our understanding of the large-scale structure of the Universe, and also defines how galaxies form and evolve. On page 397, Genzel et al.2 report measurements of the rotation speeds of distant galaxies, extending the work that began nearly 50 years ago, but to a time when the Universe was approximately 20% of its current age. The authors' results suggest that these early galaxies were dominated by stars and gas, rather than dark matter, shedding light on how they formed and evolved.

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Figure 1: Galaxy rotation curves.

A, NASA/JPL-CALTECH; B, DATA SOURCE: NASA HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

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  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Mark Swinbank is at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, Durham DH1 3EE, UK.

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  1. Mark Swinbank
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Correspondence to Mark Swinbank.

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Swinbank, M. Distant galaxies lack dark matter. Nature 543, 318–319 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/543318a

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