|
From New Scientist - Latest Headlines:
The wreckage of an intergalactic pile-up suggests that dark matter may be even less well understood than astronomers thought
The observations come from a massive galaxy cluster called Abell 520 that lies 3 billion light years away and results from a high-speed collision between smaller galaxy clusters. Astronomers examined the wreckage using a technique called weak lensing, which relies on the fact that the gravity of any matter in the cluster bends the light of background galaxies. This distorts their images and so reveals where the cluster's matter lies.
Abell 520 turns out to hold a massive dark core, empty of bright galaxies. Some of the core is made up of hot gas, which the team detected from its emission of X-rays, but most of it has to be something else - presumably the same dark matter that astronomers detect elsewhere in the universe.
Read the whole article
| 
Re: Cosmic 'train wreck' defies dark matter theories
