Milky Way’s “dark matter” mystery solved by astrophysicists

October 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astrophysicists have used the H.E.S.S. telescopes to detect gamma rays emitting from the heart of the NGC 253 galaxy.

September 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has developed a "scintillating bolometer", a device that they will use in efforts to detect the dark matter of the Universe. The device was developed by researchers from the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) and the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS, in France).

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has solved a longstanding mystery about a pair of stars called DI Herculis whose peculiar rotation had remained a mystery for three decades. The shift in the orbit of DI Herculis was a mystery till now.

September 3rd, 2009 MUNICH - The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a striking new image of a nearby spiral galaxy that many astronomers think closely resembles our own Milky Way. Though the galaxy is seen edge-on, observations of NGC 4945 suggest that this hive of stars is a spiral galaxy much like our own, with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region.

August 12th, 2009 STOCKHOLM - A team of scientists has established that a mysterious flux of particles in the Universe originates from exploding stars, rather than being proof of dark matter. Several independent studies recently discovered a mysterious flux of electrons and positrons in the universe.

July 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In an interesting new research, astronomers have determined that dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which contain few stars relative to their total mass, are formed by indulging in a cosmic dance. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies appear to be made mostly of dark matter - a mysterious substance detectable only by its gravitational influence, which outweighs normal matter by a factor of five to one in the universe as a whole.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astrophysicists, using extremely detailed computer simulations, have determined that the earliest stars in the universe formed not only as individuals, but sometimes also as twins. The robust simulations of the early universe were created by astrophysicists Matthew Turk and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and Brian O'Shea of Michigan State University.

July 6th, 2009 LONDON - Astronomers have come by the first solid evidence of a new class of medium sized black holes, with more than 500 times the sun's mass, in a distant galaxy. This new source, identified as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49.

July 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new theory by scientists says that our Milky Way galaxy survived intense heat generated by the "ignition" of the Universe about half-a-billion years after the Big Bang, because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter that trapped gases inside it. Tiny galaxies, inside small clumps of dark matter, were blasted away by the heat that reached approximate temperatures of between 20,000 and 100,000 degrees centigrade, according to the scientists, including experts at Japan's University of Tsukuba.

June 26th, 2009 MUNICH - With help of a unique "ballistic study" that combines data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have now solved a long-standing mystery of the Milky Way's particle accelerators. The study shows that cosmic rays from our galaxy are very efficiently accelerated in the remnants of exploded stars.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A pair of astrophysicists has predicted the birth of a star, by saying that "the inevitable future of the starless cloud Barnard 68" is to collapse and give rise to a new star. The astrophysicists are Joao Alves, director of the Calar Alto Observatory in Almeria, and his colleague Andreas Burkert, from the German observatory in the University of Munich.

June 2nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research by astrophysicists at the University of Warwick, UK, has discovered that a mystery stellar explosion recorded in 2006 may have marked the unusual death of an equally unusually carbon-rich star. The strange object, known as SCP 06F6, was first noted in 2006 by supernovae researchers in the US taking images with the Hubble Space Telescope, seeing it appearing out of nowhere, and fading again into oblivion, over the course of 120 days.

May 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New studies by cosmologists has found that the stars in the Milky Way's satellite galaxies are moving much faster than predicted by Isaac Newton's Gravitational Law, which puts the scientist's famous theory into question. In these studies, Professor Dr.

April 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An image of a region near the center of our galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the galaxy, attributing it to hundreds of point-like X-ray sources, implying that the glow is due to millions of such sources. The image shows an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope of the central region of the Milky Way, with a pullout showing a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of a region located only 1.4 degrees away from the center of the galaxy.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strong new line of evidence that halos of dark matter are embedded around small galaxies. Looking into the turbulent center of the nearby Perseus galaxy cluster, Hubble discovered a large population of small galaxies that have remained intact while larger galaxies around them are being ripped apart by the gravitational tug of other galaxies.