Long-time Slashdot reader bsharma shares an announcement from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope site:
Researchers found that small-scale concentrations of dark matter in clusters produce gravitational lensing effects that are 10 times stronger than expected. This evidence is based on unprecedently detailed observations of several massive galaxy clusters by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile…
Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the senior theorists on the team, added, “There’s a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models. This could signal a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties, as these exquisite data have permitted us to probe the detailed distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales.”
The team’s paper will appear in the September 11 issue of the journal Science… This unexpected discovery means there is a discrepancy between these observations and theoretical models of how dark matter should be distributed in galaxy clusters.
It could signal a gap in astronomers’ current understanding of the nature of dark matter.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot