A region of the Universe showing the way dark matter was distributed around 3 billion years after the Big Bang (left); dark matter clumps in red (centre); and dark matter clumps which are large enough to form stars in yellow (right).
Dark matter key ingredient for making galaxies. A team of scientists led by a Sussex astronomer has discovered the perfect recipe for galaxy formation, a forthcoming journal paper reveals. Using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory to study distant objects with the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) camera, researchers have found that it takes dark matter equivalent to 300 billion Suns to give rise to a galaxy bursting with stars. The data from Herschel - the world's largest space telescope - and SPIRE is helping to produce a map of the Universe as it was around eight billion years ago. The map project, HerMES (Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey), is led by Professor Seb Oliver at Sussex. He said: "I find it amazing that with these results we are able to understand the link between mass and star formation. "Particularly when the mass can never be seen, the star formation is shrouded in dust and invisible to normal telescopes, and only 15% of the dust emission can be resolved into individual galaxies - heroic work!" The team used Herschel to measure infrared light from massive, star-forming galaxies in the distant Universe.
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