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Oct 14, 2020

Astronomers Solve Mystery of a Galaxy Containing 99.99% Dark Matter

Posted by in category: cosmology

The mystery of a galaxy that shouldn’t have existed could now have a solution. Dragonfly 44, a faint galaxy that was found in 2016 to consist of 99.99 percent dark matter, has been closely re-examined, revealing a lower and more normal proportion of dark matter.

This would mean that we don’t have to revise our models of galaxy formation to try to figure out how they could have produced such an extreme outlier — everything is behaving completely normally, the researchers said.

“Dragonfly 44 (DF44) has been an anomaly all these years that could not be explained with the existing galaxy formation models,” said astronomer Teymoor Saifollahi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.

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