‘Dark matter hurricane’ is heading towards our planet at 300 miles per second
The cosmic weather forecast suggests there’s a ‘hurricane’ of dark matter blowing past our planet at 300 miles per second.
While that might sound alarming, we won’t notice it at all.
Dark matter is invisible to our detectors, so the stream of dark matter accompanying the remnants of a galaxy swallowed by the Milky Way will be unseen and unheard here on Earth.
But it could hold important answers about how the universe works.
The dark matter is part of the ‘S1 stream’ – a torrent of cosmic debris including stars, dark matter and other stuff, left over when a small galaxy was torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity.
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Researchers led by Ciaran O’Hare from the University of Zaragoza in Spain examined stars moving in the same direction as the S1 stream.
The researchers say they are ‘believed to be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way billions of years ago.’
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The researchers say that current detectors looking for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a form of dark matter, won’t see anything.
But, the researchers say, ‘future WIMP detectors might’.
The researchers write that the S1 stream should produce a tell-tale ‘ring’ structure around the wind of dark matter – something which detectors might be able to see.
