Dark matter is not only sensitive to gravity. It also seems to be other interactions with him, is evident from observations of colliding galaxies, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Hubble telescope, NASA and ESA.
That writes the ESO on Wednesday on her site. A team of astronomers examined with the help of the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and images of the Hubble telescope, a simultaneous collision between four galaxies in the cluster Abell 3827 ad. The researchers were able to trace the mass in this system is, and then the distribution of the dark matter to compare with the positions of the bright galaxies.
The team with the help of the so-called zwaartekrachtlenstechniek the location of the dark matter can adopt. The coincidence wanted that the collision is directly in front of a much more distant, unrelated object that happened. The mass of the dark matter around the galaxies colliding into each other distorts spacetime, causing the light rays from the distant achtergrondstelsel in all sorts of ways to be deflected. The image of the system is distorted so as to characteristic arcs.
The ESO explains on its website that according to current insights, all galaxies are surrounded by a shell of dark matter. The binding effect of the gravitational pull that dark matter exerts, ensures that galaxies are not by their rotation fall apart. That this does not happen is only explainable as 85 percent of all mass in the universe is dark matter exists, it writes ESO. The remaining 15 percent of the mass consists of ordinary matter. The total amount of mass-energy, so all the mass plus energy in the universe consists of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5 percent ordinary matter. That 32 percent of the mass-energy constitutes 100 percent of the mass in the universe. But where that matter consists, is still a mystery.
The cover of one of the four colliding galaxies in Abell 3827 ad runs behind the system is that it encloses. The disadvantage at this moment is 5000 light years, or 50 trillion miles. Probably, such a backlog between a galaxy and its dark matter if the dark matter is itself influenced by other forces than the gravity. Yet, there was not earlier observed that dark matter other than via gravity interact.
Nonetheless, caution with drawing conclusions is still offered. There has yet to be examined what other effects this delay may cause. Also, there are more observations and computer simulations are needed of similar events.
Other, recent results from the same research team to 72 collisions between clusters of galaxies, were correctly see that dark matter almost no interactions with itself are concerned. ESO makes it clear that this research does not relate to the clusters as a whole, but on the motions of individual galaxies. The researchers themselves say that the collision between the galaxies in the new study may still took more time than the collisions produced in the older research are observed. The collision took so long that even a very small power to a measurable braking could cause.
Both studies propose such limits to the behavior of dark matter, namely that the interactions of dark matter should be stronger than in the earlier observations, but weaker than at the last observations.
Meanwhile, researchers at CERN are also on the search for dark matter and the appearance in the second run of the Large Hadron Collider.
