A dark matter bridge in our cosmic neighborhood
Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - 13:00
in Astronomy & Space
By using the best available data to monitor galactic traffic in our neighborhood, Noam Libeskind from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and his collaborators have built a detailed map of how nearby galaxies move. In it they have discovered a bridge of dark matter stretching from our Local Group all the way to the Virgo cluster—a huge mass of some 2,000 galaxies roughly 50 million light-years away, that is bound on either side by vast bubbles completely devoid of galaxies. This bridge and these voids help us understand a 40 year old problem regarding the curious distribution of dwarf galaxies.