“Have you seen your body in X-rays? It looks completely different,” says astrophysicist Rashid Sunyaev. “We will do the same with the Universe.” Sunyaev, an eminent Soviet-born cosmologist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics about a joint German–Russian mission called Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) will launch into space to create a 3D x-ray map of the cosmos that will reveal how the Universe accelerates under the mysterious repulsive force called dark energy and detect up to three million supermassive black holes.
“We still don’t know what dark matter is,” said John Terning, professor of physics at UC Davis, one of two theoretical physicists at the University of California, Davis who have a new candidate for dark matter, and a possible way to detect it. They presented their work June 6 at the Planck 2019 conference in Granada, Spain. “The primary candidate for a long time was the WIMP, but it looks like that’s almost completely ruled out.”
“It really is quite uncomfortable. It shouldn’t exist; it shouldn’t be real,” Marla Geha, an astronomer at Yale University , said in 2018 of a small, strange galaxy a small galaxy that seems to contain none of the invisible stuff known as dark matter. “Yet if you look at the data, that’s the conclusion you’re drawn to.” Astronomers have long noticed an invisible elephant in the room — so-called dark matter, which seems heavier than all the visible stars, gas and dust in the cosmos by a ratio of 6-to-1.
A strange glow coming from the Milky Way’s center was thought to be due to a hidden population of pulsars. But a new look at older research shows that dark matter might still be responsible, perhaps making our galaxy unique.
An enormous “something” appears to have torn a hole in part of the Milky Way’s halo. The “dark substructure” was found via Gaia spacecraft observations—a mission producing the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy—with Harvard’s Ana Bonaca noticing a perturbation in a tidal stream. Bonaca is a leading authority on how the tidal field of the Milky Way galaxy disrupts globular clusters, and what the resulting debris can tell us about the underlying distribution of dark matter.
