2018Natur.555..629V

Studies of galaxy surveys in the context of the cold dark matter paradigm have shown that the mass of the dark matter halo and the total stellar mass are coupled through a function that varies smoothly with mass. Their average ratio M_halo/M_stars has a minimum of about 30 for galaxies with stellar masses near that of the Milky Way (approximately 5 x 10¹⁰ solar masses) and increases both towards lower masses and towards higher masses. The scatter in this relation is not well known; it is generally thought to be less than a factor of two for massive galaxies but much larger for dwarf galaxies. Here we report the radial velocities of ten luminous globular-cluster-like objects in the ultra-diffuse galaxy NGC1052-DF2, which has a stellar mass of approximately 2 x 10⁸ solar masses. We infer that its velocity dispersion is less than 10.5 kilometres per second with 90 per cent confidence, and we determine from this that its total mass within a radius of 7.6 kiloparsecs is less than 3.4 x 10⁸ solar masses. This implies that the ratio M_halo/M_stars is of order unity (and consistent with zero), a factor of at least 400 lower than expected. NGC1052-DF2 demonstrates that dark matter is not always coupled with baryonic matter on galactic scales.