WASHINGTON: As the search for dark matter and dark energy continues, a new study has put forward an interested theory claiming that Earth and other planet are likely to have long filaments of dark matter, or “hairs.”
Published in Astrophysical Journal and proposed by Gary Prézeau of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, planets and their gravitational influence on dark matter could be a key to understanding this mysterious phenomenon and one of the possible locations where astronomers and scientists can start looking for its evidence.
For two decades, research on dark matter and dark energy has led to quite a few theories and one among them is that dark matter forms “fine-grained streams” of particles that move at the same velocity and orbit galaxies such as ours. Another theory is that dark matter is “cold” and that it doesn’t move around much and the reason it is dark is that it doesn’t produce or interact with light.
Researchers have also proposed that galaxies form because of fluctuations in the density of dark matter and that gravity is the glue that keeps the ordinary and dark matter together in galaxies.
Prézeau has proposed that the formation of ‘fine-grained streams’ of dark matter is like mixing chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Swirl a scoop of each together a few times and you get a mixed pattern, but you can still see the individual colors.
“When gravity interacts with the cold dark matter gas during galaxy formation, all particles within a stream continue traveling at the same velocity,” Prézeau said. “A stream can be much larger than the solar system itself, and there are many different streams crisscrossing our galactic neighborhood.”
