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Dark matter had less influence in galaxies 10 billion years ago than it does today, according to observations by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
In the modern universe, stars on the outskirts of galaxies rotate just as fast as those in the dense galactic cores. This is surprising because the gravitational glue from the visible matter in a galaxy is not strong enough to stop these outliers from being flung out into space. Such galaxies are said to have "flat rotation curves" and the fact that the rotational velocity does not drop off at large distances from the core has been attributed to extra gravity provided by otherwise invisible dark matter.
Now, astronomers led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany have shown that galaxies in the early universe didn't seem to play by the same rules. Instead of flat rotation curves, these young galaxies had rotation curves with a sharp downward dip, caused by stars and gas orbiting the galaxies more slowly on the outskirts than in the centre. The implication is that there was not as much dark matter in the discs of these galaxies as there is in galaxies today. Instead, these early galaxies appear to be dominated by normal, visible "baryonic" matter.
To make the discovery, Genzel's team measured the rotation velocity of bright star-forming regions in distant galaxies using the KMOS and SINFONI spectrographs on the VLT. Selecting the six best galaxies from a larger data set, they found that all six had the downward dip in their rotation curve. To ensure that these six were not simply flukes, the researchers then stacked and averaged out the rotation curves from 97 other galaxies in their data set and found that downward dips were a common trend.
Unruly beasts
The observations show the galaxies during an era when the formation of stars and galaxies in the universe were at their peak. During this time, "galaxies were unruly beasts”, Genzel told physicsworld.com. They exhibited exceptionally high rates of gas flowing onto them, as well as powerful feedback from supernovae, stellar winds and black holes blowing material back out from these galaxies.
The various accretion and feedback processes afflicting galaxies in the early universe could dump a lot of energy into them, resulting in a wide disparity in rotational velocities around a galaxy. This velocity dispersion would increase with radius, resulting in the outermost parts of a galaxy's disc rotating more slowly.
Also, during the earliest times in the universe, gas and dark matter were mixed together, but gas was able to separate from dark matter by losing energy more quickly through interactions with other baryonic matter. If the decoupled gas formed a galactic disc fast enough, "then the central regions of galaxies could become dominated by baryons”, says Mark Swinbank of the University of Durham, who was not involved in the research. The high accretion rates of gas flowing onto the galaxies would then reinforce the surfeit of baryonic matter.
The dark-matter story
However, the decoupling of matter as well as the velocity dispersions may not be enough to explain the data, says Genzel. Instead, astrophysicists may also need to look at how dark matter was behaving.
Although physicists have very little understanding of what dark is, several theories have been developed to try to describe the mysterious substance. According to the theory of cold dark matter, galaxies are nestled within giant haloes of dark matter. These haloes aid the growth of galaxies by feeding them gas from the "cosmic web" of matter that spans the cosmos.
"The cold dark-matter paradigm does an extremely good job in mapping out what we have learned over cosmic time about large scale structure and the distribution of galaxies, but maybe the story on smaller scales is wrong," says Genzel.
Since galaxies were still forming during this early epoch, it is possible that their dark-matter haloes were still in flux and had not yet settled into an equilibrium state where the dark-matter's gravity could affect the rotation curves. It is also possible that feedback processes could drag dark matter around, rearranging its distribution in the halo relative to the discs of the galaxies. If true, the interaction could provide constraints on dark matter's properties.
Modelling the data
Astrophysicists will now pour over these data to see if it can be explained using current models of galaxy formation, or whether new ideas will be needed. Current models are in reasonable agreement with the observations, says Simon White, director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, "but they would require fine-tuning in terms of star-formation and feedback processes to get precise agreement".
A more difficult task may be describing how these baryon-dominated galaxies developed into the dark-matter-dominated galaxies that we see in the modern universe. "It's up to the models to understand how and when dark matter begins to dominate the central regions," says Swinbank.
The observations themselves may be the key to solving that problem. By determining the distribution of mass in galaxies during different epochs, it will become possible to join the dots. "Putting it all together will allow us to see how things developed from the early universe all the way to the present day," says White.
Nevertheless, the new findings have raised questions about the relationship between dark matter and galaxy growth. "There will, I'm sure, be a very active and probably controversial discussion," admits Genzel. "It's going to be an interesting time."
The research is described in four papers, one published in Natureand three supporting papers published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Quelle: physicsworld
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Distant galaxies lack dark matter, study suggests
Star velocities defy expectations based on standard theory
SLUGGISH STARS A hydrogen signature reveals the structure of six galaxies (top, bright regions appear red) observed with the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The signature also shows the velocities (bottom) of stars in the galaxies (blue regions are moving toward the telescope; red areas, away). Stars farther from the galactic center unexpectedly appear to move more slowly than stars closer in.
Very distant galaxies have surprisingly little dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up the bulk of matter in the universe, new observations suggest.
Stars in the outer regions of some far-off galaxies move more slowly than stars closer to the center, indicating a lack of dark matter, astronomer Reinhard Genzel and colleagues report online March 15 in Nature. If confirmed, the result could lead astronomers to reconsider the role dark matter played in early galaxy evolution and might also offer clues to how nearby elliptical galaxies evolved.
In contrast with these distant galaxies, stars orbiting on the outskirts of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies move too fast for their velocities to result only from the gravity of gas and stars closer to the galactic center. If visible galactic matter is embedded in a cloud of invisible dark matter, though, gravity from the invisible matter can explain the high stellar velocities. Using stars’ orbital velocities in nearby galaxies as a reference, astronomers expected that stars in galaxies farther away would behave similarly. “Turns out that is not the case,” says study coauthor Stijn Wuyts of the University of Bath in England.
The plot of stars’ velocities relative to their distances from a galaxy’s center is called a galactic rotation curve. In the new paper (and others posted online at arXiv.org), the team presents rotation curves measured with the Very Large Telescope in Chile for more than 100 distant galaxies, some seen as they were just a few billion years after the Big Bang,13.8 billion years ago.
When the velocities of stars diminish as the stars get farther from their galactic centers, that rotation curve is said to fall off with distance. “The data provide a strong indication that falling curves are common in this population of early galaxies,” says Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
In the papers, the authors provide several plausible explanations for the falling rotation curves, but it’s not clear which is correct, says UCLA astronomer Alice Shapley, who was not involved in the study. The results “reveal that we don't fully understand all of the details of how [galactic] disks form in the early universe.”
Genzel and colleagues suggest that the rotation curves fall off because turbulent streams of gas bring more and more material into inner regions of these distant galaxies. The gas piles up there, while dark matter is left on the outskirts. Explosions of stars and winds flowing from black holes might also drag dark matter away from the inner regions of the galaxy. Or dark matter may be distributed on a scale of hundreds of thousands of light-years, while the gas and stars in these early galaxies are interacting on a scale of only tens of thousands of light-years, Genzel says, so astronomers detect the gas but not the dark matter.
“Dark matter must be there,” Genzel says. “Without it, there are no galaxies and no ‘us,’ so we need to understand its nature and distribution to explain what we see in the universe.”
Current models of galaxy formation suggest that dark matter and ordinary matter intermixed in the early universe, so dark matter should tug on ordinary matter, resulting in rotation curves that are flat — not falling — for galaxies at the distance Genzel and colleagues observed. “We need to understand which physics is required to make simulations match the observations,” Shapley says.
Genzel notes that the way the gas and stars move in the distant galaxies is similar to the way gas and stars move in elliptical galaxies nearby. So, he suggests, the clumpy, irregular distant galaxies the team studied may be progenitors of elliptical galaxies in the local universe.
Quelle: ScienceNews