Astronomers, on Tuesday, reported that a dwarf galaxy orbiting our home galaxy Milky Way is constantly emitting gamma rays. According to them, this might be just another cosmic false alarm or can be the indicator of the fact that the much talked about dark matter known for permeating the universe has finally started to show its face.
After several years of research, cosmologists have now agreed that 80% of all matters existing in the universe are dark matters. They have also admitted that the dark matters are neither like the ordinary atomic matters constituting human beings and planets nor they resemble any other matter explained in the Standard model of modern-day particle physics.
What would happen if the scientists confirm that the dark matter is actually the factor responsible for the electromagnetic radiation? Such a revelation might mean that the majority of the matters existing in this universe are basically yet-to-be-identified elementary particles that are 20-100 times heavier than a proton and are clumping and drifting like fog on space since the time of the Big Bang.
When conducting the above mentioned study to find out the causes of emission of the gamma rays, a group of scientists at the Cambridge University used data collected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope of NASA; it’s a telescope assigned for orbiting the Earth and searching for gamma rays emitted from a slack gathering of stars called Reticulum-2.
Reticulum-2 belongs to an extremely rare category of galaxies known as dwarf galaxies. These are galaxies that usually constitutes of less than a hundred stars. They are one millionth the size of Milky Way and their luminosity is one billionth of that of our home galaxy.
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As a result of being home to just a few stars, the dwarf galaxies are often preferred by astronomers over the big ones when it comes to carrying out studies on the dark matter. Scientists have been chasing that mysterious entity since the 1930s i.e. when Fritz Zwicky hinted that movement of galaxies is influenced by an invisible matter. The quest for dark matter got momentum again during the 1970s when a team of scientists led by Vera Rubin discerned that all galaxies remain under the gravitational influence of huge clouds of an invisible matter.