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Tech2 News Staff
Nov 21, 2018 5:16 PM IST
Earth will soon be caught in the path of a cosmic hurricane, recent article suggests. A collection of hundreds of stars and a large amount of dark matter are heading to our corner of the world, from a cosmic point of view, and we can not muster any force that can even stop it. Is this the way the world ends? Maybe not.
Are we in danger? Well no. Contrary to what may seem disturbing, Earth will not be swallowed up by an invisible galactic storm.
In fact, if it exists (scientists have theories, but no evidence of the existence of dark matter), our system is already inside the storm.
scientific have predicted that celestial amalgam will cross our system without posing a threat to the Earth.
But the "cloud of dark matter" is an incredibly complex cosmic phenomenon. It has fascinating and interconnected processes that astrophysicists want to study.
A team of researchers from King's College London, Universidad de Zaragoza and the Institute of Astronomy in the UK has discovered ESA's "dark matter cyclone". Gaia telescope data. The Gaia mission has published the locations and trajectories of nearly 2 billion stars near the Milky Way.
The scientists looked for something special in the publicly available data and found several "starflows" crossing our celestial neighbors.
One of these flows, the S1, was observed as a remnant of a collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy in what was to be a epic event of cosmic cannibalism. Astronomers have already seen currents like S1, but this is the first approach approached by a current of dark matter in our planetary system.
Researchers believe that the "dark matter" storm will cross our solar system at a speed of 500 km / s, but these figures could be misleading, according to other experts.
"Dark matter, if it exists, is extremely diffuse and will have no noticeable effect on the solar system," writes Dr. Don Lincoln, an experienced physicist at Fermilab's National Accelerator Lab. "However, the prospect of a high-speed dark matter crossing the Earth has given an opportunity to detect it."
This image of the Milky Way in visible light with a superimposed gamma ray map of the galactic center was published by NASA in February 2017 from data from the Fermi telescope. Once all known sources are removed, the map shows an excess of gamma rays, suggesting that it could be a cloud of dark matter. Courtesy of image: NASA
Physicists have proposed plans how to verify and calculate the existence of dark matter and the instruments to detect it – all without real proof of the real existence of dark matter. Researchers have reason to believe that dark matter, like everything else, consists of undiscovered particles that they are identifying and detecting.
Some of the main theories suggest that these particles could be either massive low interaction particles (WIMP) or a much lighter particle called axion. Just like the dilemma of the chicken and the egg, the researchers have no sample of dark matter to study. The instruments (including Gaia) that helped search for dark matter in the universe can now be told or in the sky to look for it, if not exactly what to find.
Given the fundamental importance of dark matter research in the field of physics, the dark matter storm could be more a cause for celebration than panic – at least for particle physicists.
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