Astronomers believe they might have observed the first potential signs of dark matter interacting with a force other than gravity.
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at Durham University, UK, made the discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to view the simultaneous collision of four distant galaxies at the centre of a galaxy cluster 1.3 billion light years away from Earth.
This is an approximately real-color image from the Hubble Space Telescope, of galaxy cluster Abell 3827. The galaxy cluster is made of hundreds of yellowish galaxies. At its core, four giant galaxies are smashing into each other. As the topmost of the four galaxies fell in, it left its dark matter trailing behind. The dark matter is invisible in this image, but its position is revealed by tell-tale gravitational lensing of an unrelated spiral galaxy behind the cluster, whose distorted image is seen as a blue arc. Trailing dark matter is predicted by theories in which dark matter is not perfectly dark, but feels more of the fundamental forces than just gravity.
More http://bit.ly/1zpe45u
'via Blog this'
No comments:
Post a Comment