What Dark Galaxies can teach us about Dark Matter

New research suggests that studying dark galaxies may teach us about dark matter’s composition and how it interacts with everyday matter.

The clue to cracking the nature of dark matter — the mysterious substance that makes up 80% of the Universe’s mass — may lie in the investigation of low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSBs), new research from a team at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore Di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) suggests.

“We have found that disc galaxies can be represented by a universal relationship,” says Chiara di Paolo, an astrophysicist at SISSA and the lead author of a study recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “In this study, we analysed the so-called Low-Surface-Brightness (LSB) galaxies, a particular type of galaxy with a rotating disc named this way because they have a low-density brightness.”

The team studied the speed at which the stars and gases that the galaxies are composed of rotate — discovering in the process that the 72 LSBs they analysed seem to display very similar behaviour. The finding consolidates several clues and hints about the presence and interactions of dark matter collected over decades of research. In turn, it also opens up new scenarios on how it interacts with the matter we see around us — baryonic matter.

Because dark matter doesn’t interact with light in the same way that baryonic matter does, we can’t directly see it. But, despite this hindrance, we have worked out how to infer its presence in the galaxies that we observe. This is because despite not interacting with normal matter, it does have a gravitational effect. In fact, without the gravitational influence of dark matter, many galaxies would simply fly apart as the baryonic matter — stars, dust and gas — that comprises them does not have enough gravitational influence to hold them together.

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