Despite the fact that the concept of dark matter has no yet been directly proven, and no amount of it has ever been studied, researchers at the Durham University have recently proposed that the formation of the Milky Way is largely favored by the fact that it was immersed in a large cloud of the elusive matter. That is to say, while billions of galaxies were formed sometime after the Big Bang, in the early Universe, millions of others failed to develop because they were exposed to incredibly high temperatures generated by the first stars and black holes.

According to experts at the DU Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), all the galaxies that were not enveloped in dark matter simply lost all the gases they would have otherwise used in their stellar nurseries. The material simply evaporated, as it was subjected to temperatures of between 20,000 and 100,000 degrees Celsius.

On the other hand, galaxies such as our own could make use of their “shields” and continue their development, as a much smaller portion of the outside heat reached their inner cores. When our galaxy was not nearly the behemoth it is today, the protection that it got allowed it to form many stars and gain strength, while other galaxies around vanished, or were reduced to nothing more than a few wandering stars.

The new theory also proposes an explanation as to why there are so little satellite solar systems around our galaxy, when there should have been a myriad. ICC experts say that constant exposure to the enormous temperatures left the dark matter around us “barren” and unable to participate in the creation of any stars or dwarf galaxies. According to current astronomical knowledge, dark matter is an essential part of the galactic formation process, although no one can say for sure what it does exactly.

“The validity of the standard model of our Universe hinges on finding a satisfactory explanation for why galaxies like the Milky Way have so few companions. The simulations show that hundreds of thousands of small, dark matter clumps should be orbiting the Milky Way, but they didn’t form galaxies.,” the Director of the ICC, DU Professor Carlos Frenk, the lead investigator of the new research, says.

“We can demonstrate that it was almost impossible for these potential galaxies to survive the extreme heat generated by the first stars and black holes. The heat evaporated gas from the small dark matter clumps, rendering them barren. Only a few dozen front-runners which had a head start on making stars before the Universe ignited managed to survive,” he adds.

The finds were presented on Wednesday, July 1st, at “The Unity of the Universe” conference, hosted by the University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. They were obtained by using the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum München (LRM) supercomputer, which ran the dark matter simulation. Researchers from the Durham and Tsukuba universities contributed to the investigation, as did the DU-led Virgo Consortium.

“Identifying the dark matter is not only one of the most pressing problems in science today, but also the key to understanding the formation of galaxies,” Frenk shares. “These are still early days in trying to make realistic galaxies in a computer, but our results are very encouraging,” University of Tsukuba Professor Dr. Takashi Okamoto, also a lead investigator for the research, concludes.