First Dark Matter Sub-Halo Found in the Milky Way

upstart writes:

First Dark Matter Sub-Halo Found In The Milky Way:

There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on "small" scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter "sub-halo" in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.

A sub-halo is a clumping of dark matter that is brought together inside of a larger "halo" that is thought to form the core of galaxies. Since dark matter primarily interacts through gravity, going theory suggests that it should attract "baryonic" (i.e. normal) matter when it clumps together. This clumping is thought to the scaffolding that galaxies are built on.

Sub-halos are even denser groupings of dark matter that coalesce because of their gravitational attraction. Since they are relatively small compared to the big dark matter halos they are contained in, they can be difficult to detect. To do so, cosmologists would have to find a gravitational signal that deviates from what would be expected given the normal matter surrounding the sub-halo. So far, no one has been able to isolate that kind of signal, despite looking throughout our galactic neighborhood.

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