Posted on by Evan Gough

Evidence of Dark Matter Interacting With Itself in El Gordo Merger

Image from a computer simulation of the distribution of matter in the universe. Orange regions host galaxies; blue structures are gas and dark matter. Credit: TNG Collaboration

The Standard Model of particle physics does a good job of explaining the interactions between matter’s basic building blocks. But it’s not perfect. It struggles to explain dark matter. Dark matter makes up most of the matter in the Universe, yet we don’t know what it is.

The Standard Model says that whatever dark matter is, it can’t interact with itself. New research may have turned that on its head.

Continue reading “Evidence of Dark Matter Interacting With Itself in El Gordo Merger”
Posted on by Elizabeth Howell

El Gordo Galaxy Cluster Even Bigger Than Thought

Hubble Space Telescope image of the El Gordo galaxy cluster. This and other gigantic galaxy clusters are challenging the most common theory of the evolution of structure in the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Jee (University of California, Davis)
Hubble Space Telescope image of the El Gordo galaxy cluster. This and other gigantic galaxy clusters are challenging the most common theory of the evolution of structure in the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Jee (University of California, Davis)

 

The Hubble Space Telescope has a new calculation for the huge El Gordo galaxy cluster: 3 million billion times the mass of the Sun. This is even 43 per cent more massive than past estimates that examined the complex in X-rays, NASA stated.

“A fraction of this mass is locked up in several hundred galaxies that inhabit the cluster and a larger fraction is in hot gas that fills the entire volume of the cluster. The rest is tied up in dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up the bulk of the mass of the universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute stated.

“Though galaxy clusters as massive are found in the nearby universe, such as the so-called Bullet Cluster, nothing like this has ever been seen to exist so far back in time, when the universe was roughly half of its current age of 13.8 billion years. The team suspects such monsters are rare in the early universe, based on current cosmological models.”

Read more about the discovery in this Hubble press release.