Ghostly Trail Of Stars Reveals A New Way To Hunt Hidden Dark Matter
For the first time, astronomers have discovered a globular cluster stellar stream outside the Milky Way, giving scientists a new way to map invisible dark matter in distant galaxies.
Located approximately 115 million light-years from Earth, the faint ribbon of stars was spotted unraveling around UGC 9050-Dw1, an ultra-diffuse galaxy. Ultra-diffuse galaxies contain relatively few stars spread across a vast volume of space, creating a nice, dark backdrop. And that background proved crucial: it allowed the faint, delicate stellar stream to stand out in archival images captured by the Hubble telescope.
The finding, detailed in the Nature journal, was co-led by Julie Kiel Holm of the University of Copenhagen and Sarah Pearson of the Technical University of Denmark, alongside researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Arizona.
Stellar streams form when the gravitational pull of a host galaxy tears apart a globular cluster, which is a tight sphere of...
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