Free Republic

The discovery of NGC 1052-DF2 has led scientists on the quest for more dark matter-deficient galaxies. What really makes up the rare and mysterious DF2 galaxy? Dark matter supposedly composes 27 percent of the cosmos, but the newly discovered DF2 galaxy, has none of it. New Galaxy In TownScientists researching ultra-diffuse galaxies have spotted a large, sparse galaxy in the northern constellation of Cetus. The mysterious galaxy is almost as big as the Milky Way but has only 1 percent of its stars. The galaxy is almost empty except for densely clustered stars moving very slow at an estimate of...

Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered a nearby galaxy that apparently has little or no evidence of dark matter. The unique galaxy, called NGC 1052-DF2, contains at most 1/400th the amount of dark matter that astronomers had expected. The galaxy is as large as our Milky Way, but it had escaped attention because it contains only 1/200th the number of stars.

Here's a problem: The universe acts like it's a lot more massive than it looks. Take galaxies, those giant, spinning masses of stars. The laws of motion and gravity tell us how fast these objects should turn given their bulk. But observations through telescopes show them spinning way faster than we'd expect, as if they were actually much more massive than the stars we can see indicate. Astrophysicists have come up with two main solutions to this problem. Either there's a lot of mass out there in the universe that we can't detect directly, mass scientists call dark matter, or there's no...