The coronavirus pandemic provided a pair of astronomers the free time to travel back through archives of old 1997 data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery 10-billion light years away surrounding an extremely rare, bright, gravitationally-lensed quasar–the first discovered, spectacularly luminous Einstein ring, named MG 1131+0456, an early universe galaxy– obscured by a feeding black hole stirring up gas and dust, cloaking the ancient object.
Like Earth’s Moon, two new studies have revealed insights into the vast number of ‘satellite’ galaxies around the Milky Way, including evidence that large satellite galaxies can draw their own small satellites into orbit. Using the Dark Energy Survey, Scientists have also extracted data about the halos of dark matter that surround these galaxies, as well as a prediction that our home galaxy should host an additional 100 or so very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery.
Dark matter pushes at the boundaries of the known fundamental laws of physics, encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics, and “The WIMP paradigm is very easy to build into the Standard Model, but we haven’t found it for a long time,” observed Jeff Dror, the lead author of the study who is a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Theory Group and UC Berkeley’s Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics about a leading candidates for dark matter that have so far defied every type of detector designed to find it, such as the WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle.
“In string theory,” writes physicist Michu Kaku, “all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the “Mind of God” is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace.”
Theories about the origin of dark matter in the universe –one of the biggest questions in science–vary from suggesting that it may be older than the Big Bang to particles the size of galaxies to highly-speculative dark-matter life, consistent with the known laws of the universe.
Scientists have yet to crack the enduring mystery of dark matter, but conjectures vary from suggesting that it may be older than the Big Bang to particles the size of galaxies to highly-speculative dark-matter life, consistent with the known laws of the universe. Now, researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Strasbourg have simulated the formation of galaxies in a universe without dark matter.
