A vast river of stars swirls Milky WayCut against the flow of our galactic halo in a complex gravity dance.According to new studies of these so-called stellar streams, their eccentric orbits may be the key to revealing invisible streams. Dark matter Lurking in our galaxy.
This study has been approved for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and can be read in the preprint database. arXiv.org — An international team of astronomers used observations from two telescopes to map the orbits, velocities, and compositions of 12 stellar streams across the Milky Way.
The stellar stream is the wreckage of an ancient collision between the Milky Way and an adjacent small cluster of stars.When these petite neighbors come into contact with the relatively huge Milky Way, our galaxy gravity It pulls and distorts them, sometimes pulling them into spaghettiized strands that orbit the edges of our galaxy.
The team used a computer model to rewind these stretched streams and determine where they came from. Based on the speed and composition of the stars in each stream, the team teamed up with six of the streams coming from nearby dwarf galaxies (small galaxies with up to billions of stars), while the other six are globular clusters. (Much smaller gravity-a combined body containing up to thousands of stars).
“This study provides a snapshot of Milky Way’s eating habits, including the types of small star systems that Milky Way” eats, “” said Tin, Principal Research Author, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Lee says. Said in a statement..
However, not all studies have revealed that. In graphing the orbital paths of these 12 stellar streams, researchers discovered that the streams were moving in ways that could not be explained by the gravity of the Milky Way alone. The orbit of the stream appears to be influenced by an invisible mass of dark matter. It is a non-luminous substance that scientists suspect make up about 85% of all matter in the universe.
“Think of the Christmas tree,” said study co-author Gerand Lewis of the University of Sydney in a statement. “On dark nights, you can see Christmas lights, but you can’t see the trees that surround them. But the shape of the lights represents the shape of a tree. It’s the same as a stellar stream. Their orbit. Represents a dark substance. “
Researchers have detected more than 60 stellar streams swirling around the Milky Way, but researchers have added that they have never mapped so many streams at the same time. Simultaneous study of multiple flow movements makes it easier to identify the invisible distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way.
This study is part of a spectroscopic study of the South Star flow (S5), a program for measuring the characteristics of the Milky Way star flow, and further discoveries that help clarify the dark matter that underpins the galaxy. I hope it will serve as a starting point for you.
Originally published on Live Science.
Shredded “stellar streams” can lead to the lack of dark matter in the Milky Way
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