The Milky Way has been hit by an invisible gun – and the criminal has escaped – Technology News, Firstpost

Tech2 News StaffMay 20, 2019 16:04:08 IST

A mysterious material has drilled holes in our galaxy but seems invisible when viewed directly by a telescope. However, scientists know that it exists.

Researcher Ana Bonaca, a researcher at Harvard University, discovered these "bullet holes".Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "It's a dense ball of something," Bonaca said. Science live. After investigating the proverbial crime scene (the holes in the Milky Way, ie), Bonoca presented his conclusions the American Physical Society conference. The mysterious question seems to have escaped the crime, leaving only huge gaping holes in its path.

The holes appear in the Milky Way in a starlet called GD-1. The stars of GD-1 are a globular cluster that is, a group of ancient stars that revolve around a galactic core, similar to a small satellite galaxy. A stellar flow is a population of stars that are stretched by tidal forces over the years. They are narrow paths of stairs across the galaxy and help us understand the formation of the Milky Way.

Stellar streams usually form in a single line, says Bonaca in his presentation. She was expecting to see a single interval in the stream where the original group existed to expand to the outside. However, GD-1 had a second hole that had rough edges and a region that Bonaca called a "spur". It was almost as if something had hit the stellar stream and dragged the stars with it.

Bonaca exposed some theories she works on at Space.com, Adding that she has not observed any object in the galaxy that could have caused this impact.

One theory is that a black hole could be the culprit. However, it is unlikely that another black hole of the required size – supermassive, like the one already at the heart of our galaxy – even exists. But Bonaca does not rule out the possibility. The second theory is even more elusive: dark matter. Although this is also, at best, an educated guess, Bonaca thinks that the question could be made, at least partially, from dark matter.

according to at NASAdark matter is more unknown than it is known. Black matter is an invisible force supposed to represent 85% of the universe. It also has its role to play in the force of gravity that prevents all galaxies in the universe from turning in the abyss (and sinking each other).

The third theory concerns the place where the object is currently located in the universe. Whatever the cause of its existence, the object is certainly of massive size and hides somewhere in the galaxy of the Milky Way.

"We know it's 10 to 20 parsecs [30 to 65 light-years] the size of a globular cluster ".

The data that led to the discovery of this mysterious case were collected by the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency European Space Mission (ESA). Gaia traces the galaxy, the Milky Way, to study its evolution, its composition and its formation.

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