[ad_1]
Dark matter, mysterious invisible stuff that makes up many of the mass of galaxies together with our personal Milky Way, is confounding scientists once more, with new observations of distant galaxies conflicting with the present understanding of its nature.
Research printed this week revealed an sudden discrepancy between observations of darkish matter concentrations in three huge clusters of galaxies encompassing trillions of stars and theoretical pc simulations of how darkish matter ought to be distributed.
“Either there is a missing ingredient in the simulations or we have made a fundamental incorrect assumption about the nature of dark matter,” Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, a co-author of the research printed within the journal Science, mentioned on Friday.
Dark matter is the invisible glue that holds stars collectively inside a galaxy. It additionally creates an invisible scaffold that allows galaxies to type clusters. But it has very peculiar properties. It doesn’t emit, take up or mirror mild and doesn’t work together with any identified particles.
The bulk of the matter within the universe, about 96 p.c, is regarded as darkish matter, with strange matter – the seen stuff that makes up stars, planets and other people – a mere four p.c.
Dark matter’s presence is thought solely by its gravitational pull on seen matter in house. It differs from the equally enigmatic and unseen darkish power, which is taken into account a property of house and is driving the universe’s accelerated enlargement. Dark power is repulsive. Dark matter attracts by gravity.
The new research concerned observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
When the sunshine from distant sources like faraway galaxies travels by matter resembling one other galaxy or a cluster of them, the sunshine is deflected and bends – a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing,” mentioned astrophysicist and research lead writer Massimo Meneghetti of the Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science in Bologna and National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy.
The new observations confirmed that gravitational lensing results produced by galaxies residing inside the massive galaxy clusters have been far stronger than present darkish matter idea envisioned, suggesting an unexpectedly giant focus of darkish matter in these galaxies.
“This is quite surprising,” Meneghetti mentioned.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
Is this the top of the Samsung Galaxy Note collection as we all know it? We mentioned this on Orbital, our weekly expertise podcast, which you’ll subscribe to through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, obtain the episode, or simply hit the play button under.
[ad_2]
Source