dark matter tagged posts

Computer simulations carried out by astronomers from the University of Groningen in collaboration with researchers from Germany, France and Sweden show that most of the (dark) matter beyond the Local Group of galaxies (which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy) must be organized in an extended plane. Above and below this plane are large voids. The observed motions of nearby galaxies and the joint masses of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy can only be properly explained with this “flat” mass distribution...

In the early 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed galaxies in space moving faster than their mass should allow, prompting him to infer the presence of some invisible scaffolding—dark matter—holding the galaxies together. Nearly 100 years later, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope may have provided direct evidence of dark mattner, allowing the invisible matter to be “seen” for the very first time.

The elusive nature of ...

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope hint that the universe’s first stars might not have been ordinary fusion-powered suns, but enormous “supermassive dark stars” powered by dark matter annihilation. These colossal, luminous hydrogen-and-helium spheres may explain both the existence of unexpectedly bright early galaxies and the origin of the first supermassive black holes.

In the early universe, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars emerged from vast, untouched clouds of hydrogen and helium. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that some of these early stars may have been unlike the familiar (nuclear fusion-powered) stars that astronomers have studied for centuries...

According to a new Physical Review Letters study, black holes could help solve the dark matter mystery. The shadowy regions in black hole images captured by the Event Horizon Telescope can act as ultra-sensitive detectors for the invisible material that makes up most of the universe’s matter.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85% of the universe’s matter, but scientists still don’t know what it actually is. While researchers have proposed countless ways to detect it, this study introduces black hole imaging as a fresh detection method—one that comes with some distinct benefits.

The...