General, Research, Technology

What would our galaxy look like without dark matter?

Dark matter - mysterious invisiblea substance that has a huge impact on the evolution of galaxies in the universe. Despite the fact that the mysterious “something” absolutely does not interact with electromagnetic energy, without his help the world around us could look in a completely different way. According to the phys.org portal, researchers from Bonn University were the first to model the formation of galaxies in the Universe without the participation of “dark” matter. In order to reproduce such a process on a computer, scientists had to slightly modify Newton’s usual gravitational laws, and although the galaxies created by computer calculations are similar to those that we see today, there are a number of objects between galaxies and real galaxies without dark matter some differences. So what can help an unusual study for modern cosmology, still puzzling over the nature of dark matter?

Image of a galaxy with a complete absence of dark matter in it

How did dark matter form?

When as a result of the Big Bang, matterspread throughout the universe, its intensity was not evenly distributed in space. Larger clumps of matter attracted smaller pieces to themselves, eventually forming clusters of gases, and then galaxies. An important part of this history of the universe is the so-called dark matter, which may be responsible for the initial uneven distribution of matter. A similar assumption also explains some of the mysterious observations that scientists attribute to the semi-mystical substance. So, for example, stars in rotating galaxies often move at such an incredible speed that without the participation of some “star putty” they would simply be thrown away from their star “brothers”. In this case, an additional source of gravity, which cannot be seen through the telescope, that same mysterious dark matter, can claim the role of the cosmic “tamer”.

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Dark matter in galaxies helps them not to lose stars while moving

Due to direct evidencethere is still no dark matter, researchers from the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics of Bonn University decided to create a model for the development of the Universe without the participation of the mysterious substance that sticks together galaxies. According to their hypothesis, the attraction between two massive objects obeys Newton’s laws only until a certain point. With small accelerations that exist in galaxies, the total force of gravity increases significantly, which leads to the fact that large stellar objects do not decay during their rotation.

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In order to test this theory, scientistsWe used special software that allows us to simulate the formation of stars and galaxies, starting from the primary gas cloud and ending with the processes that took place in the Universe several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Researchers argue that their results in many aspects are surprisingly close to what scientists observe using modern telescopes. In this case, maybe there is no dark matter at all?

Proponents of the existence of dark matter believethat recently published research results are not in all respects true. Scientists are sure that in order to completely refute the theory of the existence of a certain exotic substance that has taken root in the scientific world, specialists from Bonn University may need to repeat the calculations and include more complex factors affecting gravity in large space objects in the scheme. If the results of new research show similar behavior to what has already been discovered, the scientific world can expect a major upheaval in most modern ideas about cosmology.