Dark matter is invisible. Based on the effect of gravitational lensing, a ring of dark matter has been inferred in this image of a galaxy cluster (CL0024+17) and has been represented in blue. Image: NASA/ESA.
Dark Matter is rightly called one of the greatest mysteries in the Universe. In fact, so mysterious is it, that we here in the opulent sky-scraper offices of Universe Today often joke that it should be called “Dark Mystery.” But that sounds like a cheesy History Channel show, and here at Universe Today we don’t like cheesy, so Dark Matter it remains.
Though we still don’t know what exactly Dark Matter is, we keep learning more about how it interacts with the rest of the Universe, and nibbling around at the edges of what it might be. But before we get into the latest news about Dark Matter, it’s worth stepping back a bit to remind ourselves of what is known about Dark Matter.
Evidence from cosmology shows that about 25% of the mass of the Universe is Dark Matter, also known as non-baryonic matter. Baryonic matter is ‘normal’ matter, which we are all familiar with. It’s made up of protons and neutrons, and it’s the matter that we interact with every day.
Cosmologists can’t see the 25% of matter that is Dark Matter, because it doesn’t interact with light. But they can see the effect it has on the large scale structure of the Universe, on the cosmic microwave background, and in the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. So they know it’s there.
Large galaxies like our own Milky Way are surrounded by what is called a halo of Dark Matter. These huge haloes are in turn surrounded by smaller sub-haloes of Dark Matter. These sub-haloes have enough gravitational force to form dwarf galaxies, like the Milky Way’s own Sagittarius and Canis Major dwarf galaxies. Then, these dwarf galaxies themselves have their own Dark Matter haloes, which at this scale are now much too small to contain gas or stars. Called dark satellites, these smaller haloes are of course invisible to telescopes, but theory states they should be there.
But proving that these dark satellites are even there requires some evidence of the effect they have on their host galaxies.
Now, thanks to Laura Sales, who is an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside’s, Department of Physics and Astronomy, and her collaborators at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands, Tjitske Starkenberg and Amina Helmi, there is more evidence that these dark satellites are indeed there.
Their paper shows that when a dark satellite is at its closest point to a dwarf galaxy, the satellite’s gravitational influence compresses the gas in the dwarf. This causes a sustained period of star formation, called a starburst, that can last for billions of years.
NGC 5253 is one of the nearest of the known Blue Compact Dwarf (BCD) galaxies, and is located at a distance of about 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It is experiencing a starburst of hot, young stars, which could be caused by dark satellites. Image: NASA/ESA/Hubble.
Their modelling suggests that dwarf galaxies should be exhibiting a higher rate of star formation than would otherwise be expected. And observation of dwarf galaxies reveals that that is indeed the case. Their modelling also suggests that when a dark satellite and a dwarf galaxy interact, the shape of the dwarf galaxy should change. And again, this is born out by the observation of isolated spheroidal dwarf galaxies, whose origin has so far been a mystery.
The exact nature of Dark Matter is still a mystery, and will probably remain a mystery for quite some time. But studies like this keep shining more light on Dark Matter, and I encourage readers who want more detail to read it.
We’ve had an abundance of news stories for the past few months, and not enough time to get to them all. So we’ve started a new system. Instead of adding all of the stories to the spreadsheet each week, we are now using a tool called Trello to submit and vote on stories we would like to see covered each week, and then Fraser will be selecting the stories from there. Here is the link to the Trello WSH page (http://bit.ly/WSHVote), which you can see without logging in. If you’d like to vote, just create a login and help us decide what to cover!
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page.
Milky Way (without the constellations) by Matt Dieterich
Hundreds of galaxies hidden from sight by our own Milky Way galaxy have been studied for the first time. Though only 250 million light years away—which isn’t that far for galaxies—they have been obscured by the gas and dust of the Milky Way. These galaxies may be a tantalizing clue to the nature of The Great Attractor.
On February 9th, an international team of scientists published a paper detailing the results of their study of these galaxies using the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Parkes radio telescope, a 64 meter telescope in Australia. The ‘scope is equipped with an innovative new multi-beam receiver, which made it possible to peer through the Milky Way into the galaxies behind it.
The area around the Milky Way that is obscured to us is called the Zone of Avoidance (ZOA). This study focused on the southern portion of the ZOA, since the telescope is in Australia. (The northern portion of the ZOA is currently being studied by the Arecibo radio telescope, also equipped with the new multi-beam receiver.) The significance of their work is not that they found hundreds of new galaxies. There was no reason to suspect that galactic distribution would be any different in the ZOA than anywhere else. What’s significant is what it will tell us about The Great Attractor.
The Great Attractor is a feature of the large-scale structure of the Universe. It is drawing our Milky Way galaxy, and hundreds of thousands of other galaxies, towards it with the gravitational force of a million billion suns. The Great Attractor is an anomaly, because it deviates from our understanding of the universal expansion of the universe. “We don’t actually understand what’s causing this gravitational acceleration on the Milky Way or where it’s coming from,” said Professor Lister Staveley-Smith of The University of Western Australia, the lead author of the study.
“We know that in this region there are a few very large collections of galaxies we call clusters or superclusters, and our whole Milky Way is moving towards them at more than two million kilometres per hour.”
The core of the Milky Way seen in Infrared. Seeing through this has been a real challenge. Credit: NASA/Spitzer
Professor Staveley-Smith and his team reported that they found 883 galaxies, of which over one third have never been seen before. “The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it’s very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it,” he said.
The team identified new structures in the ZOA that could help explain the movement of The Milky Way, and other galaxies, towards The Great Attractor, at speeds of up to 200 million kilometres per hour. These include three galaxy concentrations, named NW1, NW2, and NW3, and two new clusters, named CW1 and CW2.
University of Cape Town astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg, a member of the team who did this work, says “An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars, so finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn’t know about until now.”
How exactly these new galaxies affect The Great Attractor will have to wait for further quantitative analysis in a future study, according to the paper. The data from the Arecibo scope will show us the northern hemisphere of the ZOA, which will also help build our understanding. But for now, just knowing that there are hundreds of new galaxies in our region of space sheds some light on the large-scale structure of our neighbourhood in the universe.
Here’s an amazing photograph of the Milky Way by astrophotographer Matt Dieterich. He took the image a step further, however, and identified all the constellations you can see close to the Milky Way.
You’ll want to click this image and see a bigger version.
Full panoramic view of the constellations near the Milky Way by Matt Dieterich
Right down near the horizon is Sagittarius – it looks like a teapot, with the Milky Way rising like steam from its spout. Many of the brightest, most spectacular nebulae in the night sky are located around this constellation: the Lagoon Nebula, Trifid Nebula, and the Omega Nebula. The 4 million solar mass supermassive black hole located at the center of the Milky Way is located in this region too.
Further up the Milky Way you can see the three constellations that form the Summer Triangle: Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila.
And right on the left side of the photograph is Cassiopeia, with its familiar “W” shape.
In the lower-right of the image are a few constellations from the zodiac: Scorpio, Libra and Virgo. And if you look closely you can see Saturn making its way across the sky, in the plane of the ecliptic.
If you’re interested in learning about the night sky, I highly recommend you take your time and learn your constellations. These are your wayposts, navigational aides that help you find your way across the Universe, to the wonders right there in the sky above you.
Matt used a Nikon D750 camera with a 24mm f/1.4 lens. The whole image is made up of 20 separate exposures of 15 seconds each, stitched together to make this amazing mosaic. He captured this image from Glacier National Park in Northern Montana.
Here’s the original version, without the highlighted constellations. Once again, you’ll want to click to see the full resolution goodness.
Milky Way (without the constellations) by Matt Dieterich
A big thanks to Matt for contributing this picture to the Universe Today Flickr pool. If you’re an astrophotographer, you’ll be in good company, with thousands of other photographers who share their pictures. We’ve got more than 33,000 pictures there now.
This road near Phoenix, Arizona leads to the heart of the Milky Way. Well, that’s assuming your car will handle the 26,000 light-year drive, and can fly through, uh, space. And you can endure the cold, radiation and space madness. Anyway, you get the metaphor.
Tyler Sichelski took this photo of the galactic core, the central bulge of the Milky Way. It’s a region of incredible density and activity, and at the very heart, hidden from our view is the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, with 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Within a parsec’s distance of this black hole, there are thousands of old, main-sequence stars as well as some of the hottest, brightest stars around.
Path by Tyler Sichelski
Unfortunately, we can’t actually see the center of the galaxy because of the gas and dust that obscures our view. And in this photograph, you can actually see the dark dust lanes and regions. Many of the nebulae you’re familiar with are in this picture, like the Lagoon Nebula, the Omega Nebula and the Trifid Nebula. In fact, it’s hard to know where one nebula ends, and the next one starts.
Tyler used a Canon 6D camera with a 16-28mm f/2.8 lens. He took 10 separate exposures of the sky and then stacked them up in Photoshop.
Of course, you should check out more of Tyler’s photographs at the Universe Today Flickr photo pool (nearly 2,000 members and 33,000 photographs now). This is a place where astrophotographers share their photos of the night sky, and then we reshare them on our website and across our social media.
Is our 13.8 billion year old universe actually in its death throes?
Poor Universe, its demise announced right in it’s prime. At only 13.8 billion years old, when you peer across the multiverse it’s barely middle age. And yet, it sadly dwindles here in hospice.
Is it a Galactus infestation? The Unicronabetes? Time to let go, move on and find a new Universe, because this one is all but dead and gone and but a shell of its former self.
The news of imminent demise was recently broadcast in mid 2015. Based on research looking at the light coming from over 200,000 galaxies, they found that the galaxies are putting out half as much light as they were 2 billion years ago. So if our math is right, less light equals more death.
So tell it to me straight, Doctor Spaceman(SPAH-CHEM-AN), how long have we got? Astronomers have known for a long time that the Universe was much more active in the distant past, when everything was closer and denser, and better. Back then, more of it was the primordial hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, supplying galaxies for star formation. Currently, there are only 1 to 3 new stars formed in the Milky Way every year. Which is pretty slow by Milky Way standards.
Not even at the busiest time of star formation, our Sun formed 5 billion years ago. 5 billion years before that, just a short 4 billion after the Big Bang, star formation peaked out. There were 30 times more stars forming then, than we see today.
When stars were formed actually makes a difference. For example, the fact that it took so long for our Sun to form is a good thing. The heavier elements in the Solar System, really anything higher up the periodic table from hydrogen and helium, had to be formed inside other stars. Main sequence stars like our own Sun spew out heavier elements from their solar winds, while supernovae created the heaviest elements in a moment of catastrophic collapse. Astronomers are pretty sure we needed a few generations of stars to build up enough of the heavier elements that life depends on, and probably wouldn’t be here without it.
Even if life did form here on Earth billions of years ago, when the Universe was really cranking, it would wish it was never born. With 30 times as much star formation going on, there would be intense radiation blasting away from all these newly forming stars and their subsequent supernovae detonations. So be glad life formed when it did. Sometimes a little quiet is better.
So, how long has the Universe got? It appears that it’s not going to crash together in the future, it’s just going to keep on expanding, and expanding, forever and ever.
Our eyes would never see the Crab Nebula as this Hubble image shows it. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
In a few billion years, star formation will be a fraction of what it is today. In a few trillion, only the longest lived, lowest mass red dwarfs will still be pushing out their feeble light. Then, one by one, galaxies will see their last star flicker and fade away into the darkness. Then there’ll only be dead stars and dead planets, cooling down to the background temperature of the Universe as their galaxies accelerate from one another into the expanding void.
Eventually everything will be black holes, or milling about waiting to be trapped in black holes. And these black holes themselves will take an incomprehensible mighty pile of years to evaporate away to nothing.
So yes, our Universe is dying. Just like in a cheery Sartre play, it started dying the moment it began its existence. According to astronomers, the Universe will never truly die. It’ll just reach a distant future when there’s so little usable energy, it’ll be mostly dead. Dead enough? Dead inside.
As Miracle Max knows, mostly dead is still slightly alive. Who knows what future civilizations will figure out in the googol years between then and now.
Too sad? Let’s wildly speculate on futuristic technologies advanced civilizations will use to outlast the heat death of the Universe or flat out cheat death and re-spark it into a whole new cycle of Universal renewal.
Rogue stars are moving so quickly they’re leaving the Milky Way, and never coming back. How in the Universe could this happen?
Stars are built with the lightest elements in the Universe, hydrogen and helium, but they contain an incomprehensible amount of mass. Our Sun is made of 2 x 10^30 kgs of stuff. That’s a 2 followed by 30 zeros. That’s 330,000 times more stuff than the Earth.
You would think it’d be a bit of challenge to throw around something that massive, but there are events in the Universe which are so catastrophic, they can kick a star so hard in the pills that it hits galactic escape velocity.
Rogue, or hypervelocity stars are moving so quickly they’re leaving the Milky Way, and never coming back. They’ve got a one-way ticket to galactic voidsville. The velocity needed depends on the location, you’d need to be traveling close to 500 kilometers per second. That’s more than twice the speed the Solar System is going as it orbits the centre of the Milky Way.
There are a few ways you can generate enough kick to fire a star right out of the park. They tend to be some of the most extreme events and locations in the Universe. Like Supernovae, and their big brothers, gamma ray bursts.
Supernovae occur when a massive star runs out of hydrogen, keeps fusing up the periodic table of elements until it reaches iron. Because iron doesn’t allow it to generate any energy, the star’s gravity collapses it. In a fraction of a second, the star detonates, and anything nearby is incinerated. But what if you happen to be in a binary orbit with a star that suddenly vaporizes in a supernova explosion?
That companion star is flung outward with tremendous velocity, like it was fired from a sling, clocking up to 1,200 km/s. That’s enough velocity to escape the pull of the Milky Way. Huzzah! Onward, to adventure! Ahh, crap… please do not be pointed at the Earth?
This artist’s impression shows the dust and gas around the double star system GG Tauri-A.
Another way to blast a star out of the Milky Way is by flying it too close to Kevin, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy.
And for the bonus round, astronomers recently discovered stars rocketing away from the galactic core as fast as 900 km/s. It’s believed that these travelers were actually part of a binary system. Their partner was consumed by the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, and the other is whipped out of the galaxy in a gravitational jai halai scoop.
Interestingly, the most common way to get flung out of your galaxy occurs in a galactic collision. Check out this animation of two galaxies banging together. See the spray of stars flung out in long tidal tails? Billions of stars will get ejected when the Milky Way hammers noodle first into Andromeda.
A recent study suggests half the stars in the Universe are rogue stars, with no galaxies of their own. Either kicked out of their host galaxy, or possibly formed from a cloud of hydrogen gas, flying out in the void. They are also particularly dangerous to Carol Danvers.
Considering the enormous mass of a star, it’s pretty amazing that there are events so catastrophic they can kick entire stars right out of our own galaxy.
What do you think life would be like orbiting a hypervelocity star? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
NGC 1300, a spiral, barred galaxy viewed nearly face-on by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble
For millennia, human beings have stared up at the night sky and stood in awe of the Milky Way. Today, stargazers and amateur astronomers continue in this tradition, knowing that what they are witnessing is in fact a collection of hundreds of millions of stars and dust clouds, not to mention billions of other worlds.
But one has to wonder, if we can see the glowing band of the Milky Way, why can’t we see what lies towards the center of our galaxy? Assuming we are looking in the right direction, shouldn’t we able to see that big, bright bulge of stars with the naked eye? You know the one I mean, it’s in all the pictures!
Unfortunately, in answering this question, a number of reality checks have to be made. When it is dark enough, and conditions are clear, the dusty ring of the Milky Way can certainly be discerned in the night sky. However, we can still only see about 6,000 light years into the disk with the naked eye, and relying on the visible spectrum. Here’s a rundown on why that is.
Size and Structure:
First of all, the sheer size of our galaxy is enough to boggle the mind. NASA estimates that the Milky Way is between 100,000 – 120,000 light-years in diameter – though some information suggests it may be as much as 150,000 – 180,000 light-years across. Since one light year is about 9.5 x 1012km, this makes the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy approximately 9.5 x 1017 – 1.14 x 1018 km in diameter.
To put that in layman’s terms, that 950 quadrillion (590 quadrillion miles) to 1.14 quintillion km (7oo septendecillion miles). The Milky Way is also estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars, (although that could be as high as one trillion), and may have as many as 100 billion planets.
At the center, measuring approx. 10,000 light-years in diameter, is the tightly-packed group of stars known as the “bulge”. At the very center of this bulge is an intense radio source, named Sagittarius A*, which is likely to be a supermassive black hole that contains 4.1 million times the mass of our Sun.
We, in our humble Solar System, are roughly 28,000 light years away from it. In short, this region is simply too far for us to see with the naked eye. However, there is more to it than just that…
Radio image of the night sky. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, generated by Glyn Haslam.
Low Surface Brightness:
In addition to being a spiral barred galaxy, the Milky Way is what is known as a Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxy – a classification that refers to galaxies where their surface brightness is, when viewed from Earth, at least one magnitude lower than the ambient night sky. Essentially, this means that the sky needs to be darker than about 20.2 magnitude per square arcsecond in order for the Milky Way to be seen.
This makes the Milky Way difficult to see from any location on Earth where light pollution is common – such as urban or suburban locations – or when stray light from the Moon is a factor. But even when conditions are optimal, there still only so much we can see with the naked eye, for reasons that have much to do with everything that lies between us and the galactic core.
Dust and Gas:
Though it may not look like it to the casual observer, the Milky Way is full of dust and gas. This matter is known as as the interstellar medium, a disc that makes up a whopping 10-15% of the luminous/visible matter in our galaxy and fills the long spaces in between the stars. The thickness of the dust deflects visible light (as is explained here), leaving only infrared light to pass through the dust.
This dazzling infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope showing hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This makes infrared telescopes like the Spitzer Space Telescope extremely valuable tools in mapping and studying the galaxy, since it can peer through the dust and haze to give us extraordinarily clear views of what is going on at the heart of the galaxy and in star-forming regions. However, when looking in the visual spectrum, light from Earth, and the interference effect of dust and gas limit how far we can see.
Limited Instrumentation:
Astronomers have been staring up at the stars for thousands of years. However, it was only in comparatively recent times that they even knew what they were looking at. For instance, in his book Meteorologica, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote that the Greek philosophers Anaxagoras (ca. 500–428 BCE) and Democritus (460–370 BCE) had proposed that the Milky Way might consist of distant stars.
However, Aristotle himself believed the Milky Way was be caused by “the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together” and that these ignitions takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere. Like many of Aristotle’s theories, this would remain canon for western scholars until the 16th and 17th centuries, at which time, modern astronomy would begin to take root.
Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, many medieval scholars took a different view. For example, Persian astronomer Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973–1048) proposed that the Milky Way is “a collection of countless fragments of the nature of nebulous stars”. Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (1292–1350) of Damascus similarly proposed that the Milky Way is “a myriad of tiny stars packed together in the sphere of the fixed stars” and that these stars are larger than planets.
Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274) also claimed in his book Tadhkira that: “The Milky Way, i.e. the Galaxy, is made up of a very large number of small, tightly clustered stars, which, on account of their concentration and smallness, seem to be cloudy patches. Because of this, it was likened to milk in color.”
Despite these theoretical breakthroughs, it was not until 1610, when Galileo Galilei turned his telescope towards the heavens, that proof existed to back up these claims. With the help of telescopes, astronomers realized for the first time that there were many, many more stars in the sky than the ones we can see, and that all of the ones that we can see are a part of the Milky Way.
Over a century later, William Herschel created the first theoretical diagram of what the Milky Way (1785) looked like. In it, he described the shape of the Milky Way as a large, cloud-like collection of stars, and claimed the Solar System was close to the center. Though erroneous, this was the first attempt at hypothesizing what our cosmic backyard looked like.
It was not until the 20th century that astronomers were able to get an accurate picture of what our Galaxy actually looks like. This began with astronomer Harlow Shapely measuring the distributions and locations of globular star clusters. From this, he determined that the center of the Milky Way was 28,000 light years from Earth, and that the center was a bulge, rather than a flat area.
This annotated artist’s conception illustrates our current understanding of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. Image Credit: NASA
In 1923, astronomer Edwin Hubble used the largest telescope of his day at the Mt. Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Calif., to observe galaxies beyond our own. By observing what spiral galaxies look like throughout the universe, astronomers and scientists were able to get an idea of what our own looks like.
Since that time, the ability to observe our galaxy through multiple wavelengths (i.e. radio waves, infrared, x-rays, gamma-rays) and not just the visible spectrum has helped us to get an even better picture. In addition, the development of space telescopes – such as Hubble, Spitzer, WISE, and Kepler – have been instrumental in allowing us to make observations that are not subject to interference from our atmosphere or meteorological conditions.
But despite our best efforts, we are still limited by a combination of perspective, size, and visibility barriers. So far, all pictures that depict our galaxy are either artist’s renditions or pictures of other spiral galaxies. Until quite recently in our history, it was very difficult for scientists to gauge what the Milky Way looks like, mainly because we’re embedded inside it.
To get an actual view of the Milky Way Galaxy, several things would need to happen. First, we would need a camera that worked in space that had a wide field of view (aka. Hubble, Spitzer, etc). Then we’d need to fly that camera to a spot that’s roughly 100,000 light years above the Milky Way and point it back at Earth. With our current propulsion technology, that would take 2.2 billion years to accomplish.
Milky Way in infrared. Image credit: COBE
Fortunately, as noted already, astronomers have a few additional wavelengths they can use to see into the galaxy, and these are making much more of the galaxy visible. In addition to seeing more stars and more star clusters, we’re able to see more of the center of our Galaxy as well, which includes the supermassive black hole that has been theorized as existing there.
For some time, astronomers have had name for the region of sky that is obscured by the Milky Way – the “Zone of Avoidance“. Back in the days when astronomers could only make visual observations, the Zone of Avoidance took up about 20% of the night sky. But by observing in other wavelengths, like infrared, x-ray, gamma rays, and especially radio waves, astronomers can see all but about 10% of the sky. What’s on the other side of that 10% is mostly a mystery.
In short, progress is being made. But until such time that we can send a ship beyond our Galaxy that can take snapshots and beam them back to us, all within the space of our own lifetimes, we’ll be dependent on what we can observe from the inside.
And be to sure to check out Universe Today’s interview with Dr. Andrea Ghez, Professor of Astronomy at UCLA, talking about what is at the center of our Galaxy.
