Limit on the size of dark matter blocks

If dark matter is really only in a large mass, then they cannot be more than a tenth of the Earth's mass. This has been said by physicists from Germany and the United Kingdom, who have studied gravitational lens data from nearly 300 distant supernovae.

Is the black hole really a dark energy star (Photo: melikamp)

This finding may require the concept of dark matter - the mysterious substance thought to constitute the majority of matter in the universe - to be reviewed by cosmologists who have assumed dark matter can have many times the mass of the Sun ( Physical Review Letters 98 071302, 2007 ).

When physicists look at the sky, they realize that nearly enough of the material visible to keep the universe together with the assumption that our understanding of gravity is accurate - in fact, yes 95% has been lost. That's why there is a lot of support for the idea of ​​dark matter, a kind of material that can explain lost masses, but it is invisible to modern telescopes because of it. Do not interact strongly with light.

According to the most common model, dark matter may be the accumulation of so far unseen heavy particles (" WIMPs " or weak weakly weakly interacting massive particles), or thick masses. condensation of ordinary matter but does not emit large amounts of observable radiation (" MCOs ", massive compact objects) - or even a mixture of the two.

Currently Benton Metcalf from Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Germany and Joseph Silk from Oxford University in England have tried to know how big these MCOs are. Physicists have analyzed the light from supernovae so far that light takes up to 5 million light-years to reach us. If an MCOs are scattered in the path of light rays, light will be diverged by their gravitational field in an effect called " gravitational lens ". Divergence of light can be measured.

Attractive lens phenomenon

Due to the long transmission time, the change caused by the MCO will be quite large. But despite measuring data from nearly 300 supernovae, physicists cannot find out which divergence caused by the MCOs is more than one percent of the Sun's mass, meaning that 89% of them do not exist. in. Furthermore, they said that MCOs larger than one-tenth of the Earth's mass could be ruled out from the only constituent of dark matter.

This information may be shocking for cosmologists who have viewed faint stars, neutron stars and black holes as the main component of dark matter. Instead, Metcalf and Silk propose that dark matter is almost created by WIMPs.

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