Dark Matter Gets More Mysterious

What’s the Latest Development?

A recent study of two far off dwarf galaxies challenges the standard cosmological model by presenting contrary observations of dark energy. Rather than dark matter being concentrated at the center of the Fornax and Sculptor galaxies, as the standard model would predict, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found that it was distributed equally among the millions of stars they observed. “After completing this study, we know less about dark matter than we did before,” said the lead author. 

What’s the Big Idea?

With galaxies like our Milky Way rotating through space at incredible velocities, why don’t their stars go flying off in all directions? The answer is dark matter. The gravitational force which keeps our feet on the ground, thanks to Earth’s mass, is simply not strong enough to keep entire galaxies together. As a solution, scientists have concluded that another kind of matter, dark matter, keeps stars turning around the center of galaxies. Accordingly, dark matter should be concentrated at their centers.