Astronomers make sensational discovery that refutes well-known theses about dark matter

The new work by an international group of astronomers has led to a sensational conclusion: science has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of dark matter until now. Most models of dark matter suggest that it interacts with ordinary matter only through gravity. However, observations of six ultra-compact dwarf galaxies near us have shown that dark matter does, in fact, somehow influence matter.

Ordinary matter can also be invisible in space. The key feature of dark matter is that it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation: it doesn’t absorb, reflect, or scatter it. This is why dark matter cannot be detected in any range accessible to Earth-based science. Only the gravitational pull of large clouds of dark matter helps to suspect its presence in space — it bends light passing nearby, like a lens. 

Nevertheless, for the evolution of the universe, galaxies, and the entire material world, dark matter is as essential as air is to humans. In the early days of the universe, dark matter initiated the concentration of matter, facilitating the birth of stars first and then galaxies. Dark matter is everywhere, but that doesn’t make it easy to detect. However, there is now a chance to look more closely. The new observation suggests that dark matter interacts with ordinary matter in some other way, beyond gravity.

Scientists conducted a detailed review of six ultra-compact dwarf galaxies neighboring the Milky Way. Since the mass of these galaxies was clearly greater than the mass of the stars found in them, this indicated the presence of dark matter. The idea was that the arrangement of stars in the galaxies would differ depending on whether they interact with dark matter solely through gravity or also in some other unknown way. 

If dark matter only influenced stars through gravity, some of the stars would have gathered tightly in the center of the galaxies, with significant thinning observed at the periphery. However, if dark matter and ordinary matter exerted some additional influence on each other, the stars would be more evenly distributed across the galaxy's disk. In this case, something might prevent them from clustering closer to the center. Observations of real galaxies showed that the stars were indeed evenly spread throughout the galaxies. In other words, dark matter affects ordinary matter not only through gravitational attraction.