Shredded 'stellar streams' could lead to the Milky Way's missing dark matter - Livescience.com

According to a new study of these so-called stellar streams, their offbeat orbits may be the key to uncovering the troves of invisible dark matter lurking within our galaxy.

In the study — which was accepted to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and is available to read on 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 crisscrossing the Milky Way. .

In charting the orbital paths of these 12 stellar streams, the researchers found that the streams moved in ways that the gravity of the Milky Way alone could not explain.

The streams' orbits appear to be influenced by invisible clumps of dark matter — a non-luminous substance that scientists suspect accounts for about 85% of all matter in the universe. .

It is the same with stellar streams — their orbits reveal the dark matter.".

Researchers have detected more than 60 stellar streams swirling around the Milky Way to date, but they have never mapped this many of them at the same time, the researchers added.

By studying the movement of multiple streams at the same time, the invisible distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way becomes easier to pinpoint.

This study — part of the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5), a program dedicated to measuring the properties of stellar streams in the Milky Way — will hopefully serve as a springboard to further discoveries that help unveil the dark matter that underpins our galaxy.