天体物理学家的“幸运发现”解释了没有暗物质的星系如何存在

在模拟中，碰撞会导致较小的星团失去物质。

以一种新的方式 自然天文学 由加州大学欧文分校和波莫纳学院的天体物理学家领导的一个国际团队报告了当较小的星系与较大的星系碰撞时，较大的星系可以剥离较小的星系的暗物质——我们无法直接看到的物质，但天体物理学家认为它应该是。它的存在是因为没有引力的影响，他们无法解释银河系恒星的运动等事情。

这是一种有可能解释星系在没有暗物质的情况下如何存在的机制——以前认为这是不可能的。

它始于 2018 年，当时来自天体物理学家 Shany Danieli 和 Pieter van Dokkum[{” attribute=””>Princeton University and Yale University observed two galaxies that seemed to exist without most of their dark matter.

“We were expecting large fractions of dark matter,” said Danieli, who’s a co-author on the latest study. “It was quite surprising, and a lot of luck, honestly.”

The lucky find, which van Dokkum and Danieli reported on in a Nature paper in 2018 and in an Astrophysical Journal Letters paper in 2020, threw the galaxies-need-dark-matter paradigm into turmoil, potentially upending what astrophysicists had come to see as a standard model for how galaxies work.

Dark matter distribution in a simulated galaxy group, with brighter areas showing higher concentrations of dark matter. Circles show close-up images of the stellar light associated with two galaxies lacking dark matter. If these galaxies had dark matter, they would appear as bright regions in the main image. Credit:Morena et al.

“It’s been established for the last 40 years that galaxies have dark matter,” said Jorge Moreno, an astronomy professor at Pomona College, who’s the lead author of the new paper. “In particular, low-mass galaxies tend to have significantly higher dark matter fractions, making Danieli’s finding quite surprising. For many of us, this meant that our current understanding of how dark matter helps galaxies grow needed an urgent revision.”

The team ran computer models that simulated the evolution of a chunk of the universe – one about 60 million light years across – starting soon after the Big Bang and running all the way to the present.

The team found seven galaxies devoid of dark matter. After several collisions with neighboring galaxies 1,000-times more massive, they were stripped of most of their material, leaving behind nothing but stars and some residual dark matter.

“It was pure serendipity,” said Moreno. “The moment I made the first images, I shared them immediately with Danieli, and invited her to collaborate.”

Robert Feldmann, a professor at the University of Zurich who designed the new simulation, said that “this theoretical work shows that dark matter-deficient galaxies should be very common, especially in the vicinity of massive galaxies.”

UCI’s James Bullock, an astrophysicist who’s a world-renowned expert on low-mass galaxies, described how he and the team didn’t build their model just so they could create galaxies without dark matter – something he said makes the model stronger, because it wasn’t designed in any way to create the collisions that they eventually found. “We don’t presuppose the interactions,” said Bullock.

Confirming that galaxies lacking dark matter can be explained in a universe where there’s lots of dark matter is a sigh of relief for researchers like Bullock, whose career and everything he’s discovered therein hinges on dark matter being the thing that makes galaxies behave the way they do.

“The observation that there are dark matter-free galaxies has been a little bit worrying to me.” said Bullock. “We have a successful model, developed over decades of hard work, where most of the matter in the cosmos is dark. There is always the possibility that nature has been fooling us.”

But, Moreno said, “you don’t have to get rid of the standard dark matter paradigm.”

Now that astrophysicists know how a galaxy might lose its dark matter, Moreno and his collaborators hope the findings inspire researchers who look at the night sky to look for real-world massive galaxies they might be in the process of stripping dark matter away from smaller ones.

“It still doesn’t mean this model is right,” Bullock said. “A real test will be to see if these things exist with the frequency and general characteristics that match our predictions.”

As part of this new work, Moreno, who has indigenous roots, received permission from Cherokee leaders to name the seven dark matter-free galaxies found in their simulations in honor of the seven Cherokee clans: Bird, Blue, Deer, Long Hair, Paint, Wild Potato and Wolf.

“I feel a personal connection to these galaxies,” said Moreno, who added that, just as the more massive galaxies robbed the smaller galaxies of their dark matter, “many people of indigenous ancestry were stripped of our culture. But our core remains, and we are still thriving.”

Reference: “Galaxies lacking dark matter produced by close encounters in a cosmological simulation” by Jorge Moreno, Shany Danieli, James S. Bullock, Robert Feldmann, Philip F. Hopkins, Onur Çatmabacak, Alexander Gurvich, Alexandres Lazar, Courtney Klein, Cameron B. Hummels, Zachary Hafen, Francisco J. Mercado, Sijie Yu, Fangzhou Jiang, Coral Wheeler, Andrew Wetzel, Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, Michael Boylan-Kolchin, Eliot Quataert, Claude-André Faucher-Giguère and Dušan Kereš, 14 February 2022, Nature Astronomy.
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01598-4

Funding for the work came from the National Science Foundation, sabbatical leave support for Moreno from Pomona College and the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation, and, for Danieli, from NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51454.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Other collaborators include Francisco Mercado, Courtney Klein and Zachary Hafen, all from UCI.