Tagged: dark matter

A ‘lump’ of dark matter may be ripping apart Taurus’ face

Stars are ‘dissolving’ in the bull’s head, researchers say. The Hyades — a young, V-shaped cluster of stars swooshing through the head of the constellation Taurus — is slowly being ripped apart by an enormous, invisible mass, a new study suggests. This unrest in the...

Astronomers claimed galaxy was 98% dark matter. They were wrong.

Back in 2016, researchers claimed to have found a galaxy made almost completely of dark matter and almost no stars. Now, on closer examination, that claim has fallen apart. The galaxy, Dragonfly 44 (DF44), belongs to a class of mysterious objects known as ultra-diffuse galaxies...

Could Dark Matter Spawn ‘Shadow Life’?

The vast majority of mass in our universe is invisible, and for a while, physicists have been trying really hard to understand what this elusive “stuff” is. Assumed to be some kind of particle, there are hopes that the Large Hadron Collider might produce a...

What are dark matter and dark energy?

NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) provided a true watershed moment in humanity’s quest to understand the cosmos. Its findings calculated the age of the universe and plotted the curvature of space. It mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation and, in a shocking turn of...

Is Dark Matter Made of Primordial Black Holes?

Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of the matter in the universe was not visible. About 84% of the matter in the cosmos is dark matter, much...