SCIENCE FILE / An exploration of issues and trends affecting science, medicine and the environment : Astronomers Find Evidence of Different Types of Dark Matter
From Times staff and wire reports
Dark matter, the mysterious stuff that scientists think makes up most of the universe but which has never been seen, comes in different shapes and sizes, according to Japanese astronomers. Yasushi Ikebe of the University of Tokyo and colleagues reported in Nature that they used Japan’s Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics to measure X-ray emissions from gases in the Formax cluster of galaxies, relatively near to the Earth.
They found evidence of two types of dark matter, one seen in the cluster as a whole and one associated with the giant, elliptical galaxy known as NGC1399 at the center of the cluster. The observations, they said, provide “unambiguous evidence” that dark matter exists in a broad range of shapes and sizes.
