Devon Powell, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
A piece of dark matter? A small inactive galaxy? What bizarre object is this dark speck in the middle of Space? It is the smallest dark object ever detected.
A team of scientists has just discovered a dark object with less mass, about a million times the weight of the Sun, which It could be a dense cluster of dark matter or a small inactive galaxy.
QWhen seen from the images that detected it, it looks like a tiny black dot. This is, by a factor of one hundred, the smallest dark object ever detected by scientists. But it can be much more than that.
“It is an impressive achievement to detect such a low-mass object at such a great distance from us,” said Chris Fassnacht, researcher and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and co-author of the paper published in Nature this month.
“Finding low-mass objects like this is crucial to understanding the nature of dark matter“, he tells .
Given the sensitivity of our data, we expected to find at least one dark object, so our discovery is consistent with the ‘cold dark matter theory’on which much of our understanding of the formation of galaxies is based”, explained Devon Powell, lead author of the study and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), in Germany.
“Having found one, the question now is whether we will be able to find more — and whether the numbers will continue to coincide with the models”, assures the scientist.
