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The galaxy you live in is losing steam. And it’s good.
Connecting the incredibly large spiral arms of the Milky Way is a huge rotating galactic bar made up of billions of clustered stars, but it’s been slowed down by about a quarter of its speed since its inception, according to a recent study published in the journal Avis. monthly from the Royal Astronomical Society.
This is not enough for human vertigo, but it is normal to have vertigo, as dark matter is to blame for this slowing of galactic rotation.
A dense star cluster has moved away from the galactic core
In fact, over the past 30 years, astrophysicists have predicted this will happen. But until now, no one had actually seen and measured it in action. And, more importantly, the observations have provided new information about the nature of dark matter, which functions as a cosmic counterweight to galactic rotation, pulling it at a slower rate. The researchers analyzed observations taken by the Gaia Space Telescope of a large star cluster called the Hercules flux, which moves in tandem with the bar, roughly corresponding to its radial speed.
This phenomenon also happens to the Greek and Trojan asteroids of the planet Jupiter, which orbit behind and in front of Jupiter, in its Lagrange positions. When the rotation of the galactic bar loses speed, astrophysicists would expect the stars of the Hercules Current to move further into the galaxy, as their orbital period would change to match that of the bar. But the researchers found a chemical fingerprint in these stars: they are abundant in heavier “metallic” elements, meaning they originate from a place closer to the galactic nucleus, where stars form from a gas composed of about 10 times gas in the outer edge of the galaxy.
Dark matter slowed the galactic bar by at least 24%
With this idea, the research team were brought to the conclusion that the galactic bar, which contains billions of stars equivalent to billions of times the mass of our sun, had lost nearly a quarter of its radial speed. , or at least 24%, since he was born. “Astrophysicists have long suspected that the spinning bar at the center of our galaxy is slowing down, but we have found the first evidence of what is happening,” said Ralph Schoenrich of UCL Physics & Astronomy, who is also a co-author of the study, in a ScienceDaily report. “The counterweight slowing this rotation must be dark matter. So far, we have only been able to infer dark matter by mapping the gravitational potential of galaxies and subtracting the contribution of visible matter.”
“Our research provides a new kind of measure of dark matter – not of its gravitational energy, but of its inertial mass (the dynamic response), which slows down the rotation of the bar,” Schoenrich added in the report. Since dark matter has so far gone undetected by all known scientific instruments, it has remained a mystery in modern physics, although scientists know there may be around five times as much dark matter as there is. ‘there is no ordinary and everyday matter. With this discovery, we know a little better about the characteristics and behavior of dark matter. And whatever its ultimate nature, it wields immense power in the universe, slowing the rotation of the entire bar of our galaxy.
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