Astronomer Reports New Evidence of Dark Matter

A hazy ring of dark matter created by a colossal cosmic crash eons ago offers the best evidence to date that vast amounts of the mysterious material reside in the universe, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins University said Tuesday.

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope allowed astronomers to detect the ring of dark matter, which was created by the collision of two galaxy clusters five billion light-years from Earth.

Scientists came across the evidence while studying the distribution of dark matter within a galaxy cluster designated as Cl 0024+17. Wondering about the genesis of the ring, the researchers came across earlier work showing that the galaxy cluster had run into another cluster one billion to two billion years ago.

“The collision between the two galaxy clusters created a ripple of dark matter that left distinct footprints in the shapes of the background galaxies,” Myungkook James Jee, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins. Richard Massey, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said the findings were facing skepticism within the astronomical community.