Observations of distant galaxies are puzzling cosmologists and challenging established theories of the universe, suggesting that dark matter might not exist. This is one interpretation from a study published on June 20 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "These findings raise questions of an extraordinarily fundamental nature," comments Richard Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who was not part of the study.
Astronomers believe dark matter exists because the rotation speeds of stars and materials at the edges of galaxies are too high to be explained by visible matter alone. Current gravitational theories imply that there must be a large amount of unseen matter pulling on these stars.
The recent findings are based on the principle that massive objects warp space-time. Galaxies supposedly contain massive amounts of visible stars, gas, and dust, along with a large halo of unseen dark matter. This warping causes light to bend and be distorted, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.
Using this knowledge, astronomer Tobias Mistele from Case Western Reserve University and his team searched for gravitational lensing signs around numerous galaxies to understand their contents. They analyzed a catalog of about 130,000 galaxies photographed by the VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, looking for characteristic streaks that suggest the bending and distortion of light from more distant galaxies.
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