What do you call an absence of darkness? Dark matter is supposed to be spread throughout the universe, but a new study reports a spiral galaxy that seems to be empty of the stuff, and astrophysicists cannot easily explain why.

In the outer regions of most galaxies, stars orbit around the centre so fast that they should fly away. The combined mass of all the observable inner stars and gas does not exert strong enough gravity to hold onto these speeding outliers, suggesting some mass is missing.

Most astronomers believe that the missing mass is made up of some exotic invisible substance, labelled dark matter, which forms vast spherical halos around each galaxy. Another possibility is that the force of gravity behaves in an unexpected way, a theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND.

In the spiral galaxy NGC 4736, however, the rotation slows down as you move farther out from the crowded inner reaches of the galaxy. At first glance, that declining rotation curve is just what you would expect if there is no extended halo of dark matter, and no modification to gravity. As you move far away from the swarming stars of the inner galaxy, gravity becomes weaker, and so motions become more sedate.

The rotation measurements only stretch 35,000 light years out from the galactic centre, which is not far enough to confirm that first impression. So a team of astronomers in Poland developed a more sophisticated analysis.

Joanna Jalocha, Lukasz Bratek and Marek Kutschera of the Polish Academy of Science in Krakow have found a way to splice the rotation curve together with another measurement: the density of hydrogen gas far from the galactic centre.

According to their combined mathematical model, ordinary luminous stars and gas can indeed account for all the mass in NGC 4736.

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