Galaxies love dancing. And that has become a new headache for astrologists because the discovery contradicts the existing cosmological models. This startling discovery makes it more difficult to understand the origin of the universe. According to a new study published in the journal Nature, dwarf galaxies ‘dance’ around the larger ones in disc-shaped orbits.
The disc-like movement was first observed in 2013
Geraint Lewis, an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, said that galaxies have their own sense of rhythm. The latest discovery doesn’t support the existing model which explains the movement of galaxies. The conventional model says that smaller ones swarm around the bigger ones.
The universe has billions of galaxies. Many of them are large, but most are dwarfs. Note that dwarf galaxies are not really “dwarf.” Even they have billions of stars. Researchers have been, for several years, trying to determine how the dwarf galaxies around the large ones. The theory of disc-like movement emerged in 2013 after scientists found that the dwarf galaxies surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy were orbiting along a big plane. The plane has a width of 300,000 light years and a diameter of more than one million light years.
Dancing dwarf galaxies possess opposite velocities
That finding wasn’t in-line with what scientists were expecting. So, they conducted further studies on other galaxies to determine if other galaxies in the universe also moved in a disc-like pattern. They also used data from Sloan Digital Sky Survey to study the pattern of galaxy orbits. Lewis and his colleagues found that the “dancing dwarfs” possess opposite velocities, and they were located on the opposite sides of their giant host galaxy.
Lewis said that the circular planes of dancing dwarf galaxies are universal. They are seen in about 50% of the galaxies. It challenges the notion of the nature of the dark matter and how the universe works.
