New observations made from the Chandra X-ray observatory and the Hubble Space telescope show promising developments made in the field of Dark Matter. The pictures show that dark matter do not slow down while colliding with itself. This means that the mysterious form of matter interacts less with itself than what was previously thought of.

Dark matter is a form of matter which neither reflects, nor absorbs or emits light. Yet, it makes up most of the matter of our universe. Since light telescopes fails to detect this mysterious matter, indirect techniques such as gravitational lensing is used to study it.

Hubble and Chandra help scientist discover new properties of dark matter

The team of researchers concluded from these findings that dark matter continues straight after making violent collisions. It does not slow down much, meaning that dark matter do not interact with visible particles. It also flies past other dark matter, with less interaction. Distributions of galaxies would have been shifted, had dark matter dragged against other dark matter present in the Universe.

Dark matter continues to be an “enigma” to our modern scientists. Researchers had to study 72 galaxy collisions. These collisions happened at different timeline and were captured from different angles as well.

Richard Massey, a team member of the study group says that these findings will help them to “better understand what’s going on”. Collisions of galaxies have helped researchers to understand more about dark matter. During collisions, the gas clouds surrounding the clusters smash into each other, causing a steady, slow down and in some cases, even stop the movement as well.

However, galaxies do not slow down because of the huge gaps between the stars of the galaxies. This discovery will help researchers pinpoint the properties of the mysterious dark matter. Even though not everything will be known about it, scientists will at least know what dark matter isn’t. The frictional force property of the dark matter has now been ruled out.

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