Starting a galaxy? Find the mass of 10 million suns

UCI scientists believe they have discovered the minimum mass necessary for galaxies to exist, better helping them to understand the “building blocks” that allow galaxies to form and the universe to grow, officials said Wednesday.

The discovery was part of a study whose results will be published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

Scientists analyzed light from small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way to determine the minimum mass of a galaxy — an amount 10 million times the mass of the sun.

Scientists hope this mass could help them learn more about dark matter — a mysterious, invisible substance that governs the growth of structure in the universe.

“By knowing this minimum galaxy mass, we can better understand how dark matter behaves, which is essential to one day learning how our universe and life as we know it came to be,” said Louis Strigari, the study’s lead author, in a news release.

Scientists suspect that dark matter functions as building blocks through its gravitational pull, which attracts normal matter and causes the galaxies to form, according to UCI scientists.

— Daniel Tedford