The English version of the article that has been published in the ZENIT magazine (January 2021), written by Teymoor Saifollahi and Reynier Peletier.

In the last few decades, the main focus of astronomers in studying galaxies has been to make a consistent picture of the formation of galaxies starting 13 billion years ago and how they evolved to become what we see now. This picture, known as the ‘standard model of galaxy formation’ tells us that the bigger galaxies today, such as our Milky Way, have been formed by the mergers between smaller galaxies. Also, in this picture, more than 80 percent of the matter in galaxies and in the universe is dark matter, a form of matter which is unknown to us since we can not see it.

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