So What's Going On With That 'Hurricane Of Dark Matter?'

It's the perfect sci-fi device: a hurricane of dark matter. Recent, real-life research has shown that our Sun is currently engulfed in so-called a stellar stream.

Some publications have been published on the subject of this issue, reporting that it is already in existence, we're already inside the storm. The reality of the situation is not quite so, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Stellar streams are populations of the world, but they are large and small, but they are large and small, but they are large and small.

Since astronomers are pretty sure that the stuff is dark matter, it should not be too high for the galaxies, so presumably a stellar stream should also contain some percentage of dark matter. Maybe a dark matter experiment could detect dark matter particles from the recently discovered stream running through our cosmic neighborhood.

"Ciaran O'Hare, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zaragoza, told Gizmodo. "It immediately made me think about the consequences for dark matter."

The most successful models in the world are based on the fact that the cosmos is made up of 4 per cent regular matters, perhaps 70 per cent "dark energy" that is driving the universe apart, and the rest, around 25 per cent , "Dark matter". Scientists have reason to believe that dark matter consists of particles, the same way that we can see that it is made of particles, and that it is scaffolding for the universe's large-scale structure. But this is a problem that is based on its gravitational effects.

Scientists are in the midst of hunting for a dark matter particle. But meanwhile, surveys such as the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have created huge maps of the sky, complete with positions, velocity, and other data points for our region of the Milky Way galaxy. The data revealed "substantial structures," such as this stream and accompanying dark matter hurricane, called S1, hitting the Solar System head-on.

Maybe this dark matter hurricane could be detectable by today's existing dark matter detection experiments, and would have a distinguishable signal from the Milky Way's dark matter background. It would move much faster – a "hurricane", compared to the background dark matter "wind," according to the paper published last week in Physical Review D. The researchers then analyze the future.

If the dark matter is a weakly interacting massive particle or WIMP, then the particle would be able to detect the particles. had a specific mass range, according to the paper.

Experiments like the XENON NT detector in Italy would not be able to Laura Baudis, physics professor at the University of Zurich, who was not involved in the new paper. Doing so would be a much larger detector, given the kinds of things that have already been ruled out.

And if dark matter is much more important, the effects of the hurricane's effects would be more noticeable, depending on the paper's calculations.

"I think it's quite an interesting idea," Sownak Bose, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo. "All these experiments trying to detect the dark have a chance to have their signals boosted by this extra flow."

Bose pointed out that the amount of dark matter in the stream may vary based on the specificity of the dwarf galaxy that created the stream-or if the dark matter is more WIMPs and axions. But he was excited about what the incredible amount of Gaia data could do for these studies.

So, if there is a dark matter hurricane, we're literally inside of it right now. But we're safe (from the dark matter, at least). This so-called storm is most exciting for its scientific prospects. Said O'Hare: "We know how to make things easier."