Scientists ensure that the dark matter, that was found in 2004, but not proved yet, really exists.
With Hubble Space Telescope scientists were observing galaxy cluster CI 0024+17, about 5 billion light years from Earth, when they suddenly saw the ring of invisible material located 2.6 million light years from Earth.
This dark matter is the result collision of galaxy clusters that happened about 1 billion to 2 billion years ago. Since the material is invisible and nonreflective, scientists used so called gravitational lensing technology, which bends light of a far away body while it passes through massive body, and so it enables scientists to see invisible bodies.
"I was annoyed when I saw the ring because I thought it was an artifact, which would have implied a flaw in our data," said James Jee, associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "I couldn't believe my result. It took more than a year to convince myself that the ring was real."
Scientists' previous dark matter observations showed that collisions of galaxy clusters may result in appearance of dark matters with shapes of one of the colliding clusters. But this one doesn't show the shape of any of the clusters.
"The collision between the two galaxy clusters caused a ripple of dark matter that left distinct footprints in the shapes of the background galaxies," Jee said.
The matter doesn't shine like stars do and doesn't reflect the light as planets do. Scientists have estimated that the matter is almost the quarter of the whole Universe, meanwhile stars, galaxies and dust are only the four percent of Universe. The matter is made of 27 percent of dark mass and 73 percent of dark energy, both are new and undiscovered for scientists.
"This is the first time we have detected dark matter as having a unique structure that is different from the gas and galaxies in the cluster,"Â Jee said. "Although the invisible matter has been found before in other galaxy clusters, it has never been detected to be so largely separated from the hot gas and the galaxies that make up galaxy clusters. By seeing a dark matter structure that is not traced by galaxies and hot gas, we can study how it behaves differently from normal matter."Â
Despite of the result of Jee's observation, most don't believe that dark matter exists, because galaxy clusters still "travel together"Â. If the matter really exists, the clusters must fly apart, because they can't make enough gravity to keep the clusters together. Scientist must have some other observations to make sure if the dark matter really exists.
By Ruzan Harutyunyan for HULIQ
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