Strange "holes" discovered by astrophysicists from the Russian Federation and Great Britain in the stellar stream Palomar 5 could have appeared as a result of the impact of dark matter, writes the MNRAS edition.
“Dark matter is still an extremely poorly understood hypothetical substance, which, according to the latest scientific concepts, is literally everywhere. That is, dark matter is a kind of framework for the entire Universe, stabilizing objects existing in space, even as massive as whole galaxies,”says Denis Erkal from Cambridge University.
Yerkal, as well as Vasily Belokurov and Sergey Koposov, discovered holes from dark matter in Palomar 5, carrying out a study of this structure, which is a kind of "star ribbon", the elements of which are not bound by any detectable forces, for example, gravity.
Stellar streams like Palomar 5 are parts of globular star clusters that once existed in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way.
The latter were torn apart by our Galaxy, which are still supported by dark matter. Most of the dark matter of the destroyed clusters of luminaries, by the way, was absorbed by the Milky Way.
Kolesnikov Andrey
