Dark matter is creating waves at the edge of Milky Way

It is probably the first time that scientists have spotted the dark matter creating some kind of ripples or waves at the edge of our galaxy. The creation of the waves is the result of dwarf galaxy containing dark matter being zoomed by the Milky Way.

These galactic quakes, as called by scientists , could provide a window to find out more about dark matter, reports space.com. The interaction can be seen in a new video released recently that shows computer simulation of the phenomenon.

"One of the fundamental problems in modern cosmology is to characterise dark matter. This is now giving us a way forward," says Sukanya Chakrabarti of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Chakrabarti, an Indo-American physicist, at a press conference at the 227th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida, describes the observations as the “first plausible explanation for galactic ripples.”

Currently, the best explanation that scientists have for dark matter is that it is made of particles that still remain unidentified. These particles seem to interact with the help of gravity and also through the weak nuclear force that keeps nucleons apart. Most of the matter seen in observable universe is believed to be dark matter.

The first signs about the nature of dark matter came from observations of colliding galaxies made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, reports the Daily Galaxy. Astronomers used the MUSE instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile, along with images from Hubble in orbit, to study the simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell 3827. With this method, they found the position where the mass lies within the system and compared the distribution of the dark matter with the positions of the luminous galaxies.