Dr. Arif Babul, astrophysicist and University of Victoria Distinguished Professor, and his colleagues have found debris from a huge cosmic collision that really shouldn’t be there. They have been studying Abell 520, a distant place where several clusters of galaxies, representing thousands of billions of stars, have come together at high speeds. Much of the debris has scattered after the collision, but Dr. Babul has identified a clump of dark matter that has somehow stuck together in the aftermath of the event. Since most theories of dark matter suggest that it shouldn’t interact or stick to itself, this could be an important piece of information about the real nature of the mysterious “missing mass” of the universe.
Related Links
Paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal – University of Victoria release
Space.com story
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