The Universe keeps its secrets well. Long before there was anything around with eyes to see, the galaxies formed, and the myriad of sparkling, brilliant stars were born--lighting up what had previously been a barren swath of featureless darkness. The most widely accepted theory of how the galaxies were born proposes that, in the primordial Universe, opaque clouds of pristine gas collected along immense, massive filaments composed of the transparent, mysterious, and ghostly dark matter--which is an unidentified material that is invisible because it does not interact with light or any other form of electromagnetic radiation. It is thought that the dark matter--the most abundant form of matter in the Cosmos--formed the bizarre cradles of newborn galaxies. However, in March 2017, astronomers announced that their new observations of rotating galaxies at the peak era of galactic birth, 10 billion years ago, surprisingly reveal that these massive, star-birthing ancient galaxies are completely dominated by the "ordinary" atomic matter that constructs our familiar world--with dark matter playing a considerably less important role, in comparable regions of their outer disks, than it does in modern galaxies inhabiting the local Universe.
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