SPACE.COM - A perplexing "break" in a stream of stars around the Milky Way could be the result of dark matter — that is, if the mysterious cosmic stuff interacts with itself.
The feature in question is in the GD-1 stellar stream, a thin group of stars moving together on a shared trajectory through the Milky Way's all-encompassing halo. The GD-1 stellar stream has been well-studied by astronomers, but a gap in its structure has long been a puzzle.
Now, a team from the University of California, Riverside, proposes that the cause of this feature is a sub-halo of self-interacting dark matter within the larger halo of dark matter that envelops our galaxy.
"This work opens a promising new avenue for investigating the self-interacting properties of dark matter through stellar streams," team leader and University of California, Riverside researcher Hai-Bo Yu, said in a statement. "It marks an exciting step forward in our understanding of dark matter and the dynamics of the Milky Way."