Ordinary (or baryonic) matter is relatively rare in the universe, and there seems to be a huge chunk of it missing. After 20 years of scouring the sky, astronomers using the ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory have now found clues to this missing matter hiding in intergalactic gas.
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It’s no easy feat to find dark matter, since it's invisible and barely interacts with regular matter. Now the results are in from one of the most comprehensive dark matter experiments ever run, and while the stuff was again a no-show, the study helps scientists zero in on where it might be hiding.
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Now there’s a new wrinkle to the story of dark matter, as scientists at Yale University have for the first time discovered a galaxy that appears to have no dark matter at all. Ironically, the find may just turn out to be the exception that proves the rule.
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Here at New Atlas we cover a wide variety of topics, so it's always interesting to arrive at the end of another year and see what most struck a chord with readers over the past 12 months. Read on to see what captured the imagination of you, our readers, in 2017.
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Researchers at the University of Sussex have disproved the existence of certain kinds of axions, particles that are a leading candidate for dark matter, and while it may send physicists back to the drawing board, the hunt can be more focused in future.
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Eighty-five percent of all matter is dark matter, a theoretical substance that doesn’t interact with ordinary matter and has so far eluded our best efforts to directly detect it. Now physicists have proposed a new way to find dark matter using a huge tub of helium in a superfluid state.
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Dark matter is a mysterious beast. Now, using data gathered from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found that the best way to explain how matter clumps together in galaxies is with a model of dark matter that’s both fuzzy and excited.
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Vera Rubin, the astronomer whose work first confirmed the existence of dark matter, has passed away at the age of 88. Along with that groundbreaking discovery, Rubin has a legacy of scientific achievements and awards, and was a strong advocate for women in science.
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A 20-month experiment conducted a mile underground has failed to detect dark matter particles directly, but the results are still giving scientists important clues on the nature of this elusive substance.
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Astronomers say they've made the most precise measurements to date of dark energy, while pinpointing the positions of 1.2 million galaxies in the largest ever 3D map of the universe. The map covers over a quarter of the sky, spanning a volume of 650 cubic billion light years.
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