To assist in this line of inquiry, Comerón and colleagues observed the relic galaxy NGC 1277 with an instrument called an integral field spectrograph. This allowed them to map the motion of the galaxy and determine its mass and how that mass is distributed.
This revealed that the distribution of NGC 1277's total mass — which should include dark matter — was the same as the distribution of the mass of its everyday matter contents, in other words, stars, dust, gas and planets. That means that within the galaxy's radius, there can't be a dark matter content any greater than 5%, but the findings are more consistent with a complete absence of dark matter in NGC 1277.
Zoomed-out Hubble view of NGC 1277, which lies near the center of the Perseus cluster of over 1,000 galaxies, located 240 million light-years away from Earth.The scientists behind this revelation have a few ideas about why NGC 1277 is so deficient in dark matter. "One is that the gravitational interaction with the surrounding medium within the galaxy cluster in which this galaxy is situated has stripped out the dark matter," team member and University of La Laguna researcher Anna Ferré-Mateu."The other is that the dark matter was driven out of the system when the galaxy formed by the merging of protogalactic fragments, which gave rise to the relic galaxy.
The team isn't totally satisfied with either explanation and will, therefore, continue investigating NGC 1277 with the William Herschel Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary Island of La Palma.
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