We have found a “dark matter bridge” thanks to its predictions

Optical telescopes are instruments that allow us to see very distant objects thanks to the combination of lenses, objects that, through refraction, modify the path of light allowing us, among other things, to see objects unimaginably distant. However, there are other types of lenses that astronomers have used for a few years, gravitational lenses.

An intergalactic “bridge”. Thanks to these lenses, a group of researchers He has discovered The remnants of an object that collided in the past with the galactic cluster of Perseus. Some remnants that have finally been detected thanks to the elusive dark matter.

A resolved mystery. He Perseus cluster It is a group of galaxies located about 240 million light years from Earth. These clusters are formed from very high energy mergers, events that are among the most intense from the big Bang.

Thanks to these mergers, Perseus has been accumulating An equivalent mass 600 billion the mass of our sun (or the equivalent to several hundred times the mass of our galaxy). Until now we believed that mergers were a thing of the past in this cluster, which was already in a kind of stable balance.

However, more recent and detailed observations had shown clues of recent collisions that implied that Perseus He was not in the stability situation we thought. The mystery now, was to determine which object had recently collided with this Cluster And why we were not able to detect it. Now, it seems that we have resolved this enigma.

Using lenses, otherwise. All thanks to the phenomenon we know as gravitational lens. This phenomenon, predicted by physicist Albert Einstein, is caused by gravity. This, far from “throwing” an object.

It is common for astronomers to use this phenomenon as if it were an additional lens in a telescope, allowing to see beyond what in principle would be possible. In this new study, logic It has been the opposite: Use the bottom galaxies, to detect the lens, in this case, the one formed by dark matter.

Display

Dark matter bridge. Thus they found a huge cluster of dark matter, of an approximate mass of 200 billion solar masses and located around 1.4 million light years of the accumulation of Perseus. Between both structures a structure is extended that connects them, a “dark matter bridge” that the team considers direct evidence of the last collision.

The collision would have occurred, according to team estimates, about 5,000 million years ago. “This is the piece that was missing and we were looking for,” James Jee, co -author of the study, stood out in a press release.

From the Subaru telescope. The finding was made thanks to the observations made by the Subaru telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Specifically, the team resorted to the Sprime-Cam instrument of this 8.2 meter telescope. The details of the study were published In an article In the magazine Nature Astronomy.

But is dark matter? Dark matter is one of the most popular enigmas of contemporary astrophysics. The generally accepted cosmological models are based on the existence of a “something” that interacts with “conventional” matter and energy through gravity. Dark matter is the name we give to what would otherwise be anomalies in astronomical observations. Still From the assumption about what There is this “something” And we are not, for example, using erroneous models, the nature of this matter remains one of the great mysteries of the cosmos.

In Xataka | One of the objectives of the Webb Space Telescope was to look for signs of life on other planets. He just found them

Image | Hyeonghan et al.