Astronomers have discovered dozens of solitary stars that are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. These cryptic hypervelocity stars appear to be traveling at speeds in excess of a million miles-per-hour, but scientists aren’t sure what force could have given them such a kick. An article describing these […]
Astronomers have suggested that the dark matter halos that envelop entire galaxies may not be completely dark after all, and could contain rogue stars that have been flung out of the galaxy. The case for dark matter not being quite so dark is made by astronomers in the current issue of the journal Nature. Central […]
A study of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for the existence of dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to have dark matter – estimated to constitute 83 percent of the matter in the Universe – […]
Led by Alexander Kashlinsky at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, a new study of distant galaxy clusters mysteriously streaming at a million miles per hour towards the constellations Centaurus and Hydra has tracked this enigmatic “dark flow” to twice the distance originally reported. “This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot […]
Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky first suggested that a distant cluster of galaxies would fall apart were it not for the gravitational pull of some invisible cosmic substance, and ever since then astronomers have been trying to find evidence for this mysterious “dark matter.” Now, an international team of scientists conducting experiments in a disused Minnesota […]
As modern cosmology comes to rely more and more on “dark matter” to explain otherwise inexplicable observations, there continues to be no direct proof that it actually exists. And even if it does exist, there is some doubt amongst physicists as to whether it would be able to reconcile all the discrepancies between actual measurements […]
Quasars are the brightest objects in the Universe, spewing out enormous amounts of energy making them visible across vast distances. Astronomers have long believed that quasars are in fact super-massive black holes, sitting in the middle of galaxies, sucking in surrounding matter and then emitting radiation. Previous observations of quasars have supported the theory that […]
