Stars and dark matter do not interact in “impossible ways.”
A long-standing “collusion” in astronomy – that stars and Dark matter They interact with each other in inexplicable ways – debunked by an international team of astronomers in an article Published August 20, 2024 Rocco in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
The collusion was created to explain a phenomenon that has puzzled astronomers for a quarter of a century. The density of matter in different Galaxies It appears to be falling at the same rate from the center to the outer edges. This was disturbing because galaxies are diverse, with different ages, shapes, sizes, and star counts. So why would they have the same density structure?
This symmetry suggests that dark matter and stars must somehow compensate for each other to produce such regular mass structures. “This is a great achievement for us,” said Dr. Caro Derkin, first author of the paper and an ASTRO 3D researcher from Macquarie University.
As with many conspiracy theories, no researcher has been able to come up with a mechanism for this. If dark matter and stars could interact in this way, it would change our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. However, no alternative explanation for what has been observed has yet been found.
Derkin and her colleagues found that the similarity in density may not be due to the galaxies themselves, but to the way astronomers have measured and modeled them.
The team observed 22 middle-aged galaxies in extraordinary detail using very large telescope In Chile. This has enabled them to create more complex models that better capture the diversity of galaxies in the universe.
In the past, people created simple models that contained a lot of simplifications and assumptions. -Derkin said.
Galaxies are complex and we have to model them with a lot of freedom, otherwise we will measure the wrong things. Our models were run on the OzStar supercomputer at Swinburne University, using the equivalent of about 8,000 hours of desktop computing time.
Project used MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectrum Explorer) On the VLT to analyze galaxies from the survey MAGPI (Medieval Galaxy Properties Using Integrated Field Spectroscopy)MUSE collects cubes of spectral data where each pixel is an actual spectrum.
development:
Agnieszka Novak
More information:
Source: Astro 3D
Pictured: One of the team’s VLT images showing the massive galaxies in the cluster. The galaxies at the center have a mass of about 125 billion times that of our Sun (including dark matter). Credit: Trevor Mendel, Australian National University
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