(ORDO NEWS) — A team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) discovered a strange cluster of dark matter near the Earth. This substance was discovered at a distance of only 163 thousand light-years from Earth in the dwarf galaxy Toucan II. The scientific journal “Nature Astronomy” writes about this.
It is known that the Toucan II galaxy contains stars with very low metallicity, which were formed at the stages of the early development of the Universe. According to astronomers, they managed to find the stars that belong to the above galaxy, but they are located too far from its center. These objects are located in the gravitational field of a galaxy, the mass of which is about 5 times greater than previously thought.
The discovery made by astronomers suggests that the oldest relict galaxies were more massive and extended than previously thought. Thanks to this discovery, scientists also concluded that such galaxies contain a huge amount of matter.
Dark matter is a hypothetical type of matter that astronomers believe makes up over 85% of the mass of matter in the universe, excluding dark energy. All galaxies are believed to have a dark matter halo that holds stars in it. According to scientists, without dark matter and its gravity, galaxies will disintegrate.
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