Since the Gaia Spacecraft’s April 2018 data release, astronomers have unveiled a Milky Way teeming with astounding surprises, including hints of dark-matter clumps that might eventually provide a better grasp of the elusive material’s properties. These early, easy-to-spot findings, reports Adam Mann in Nature, have been “transformational.” Astronomer Vasily Belokurov at the University of Cambridge, UK, said they are merely a glimpse of what is to come: “How we see the Milky Way has clearly changed.”
This past fall, a team of astronomers detected 10 billion solar masses worth of dark matter from an ancient dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago carried along by the S1 star stream that harbors our Solar System streaming directly towards the Sun.
