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Galaxies clash

Hubble telescope sees a clash that reveals dark matter.

Images taken by ESA/NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory shows a clear separation between dark and ordinary matter during the clash 5.7 billion light years from Earth, NASA said.

By using the technique known as ‘gravitational lensing,’ the astronomers were able to differentiate between the two substances: dark matter, which appeared blue in the image, and ordinary matter that looked like a hot pink gas.

According to NASA, when the two clusters merged (each almost a huge quadrillion times the mass of our Sun) at speeds of millions of kilometres per hour, the hot gas in each cluster collided and slowed down. The dark matter, however, did not.

It is the separation between the pink and blue material that provides the direct evidence for dark matter and supports the idea that its particles interact with each other only very weakly or not all, apart from the pull of gravity, the astronomers said.

"It is in our view an important step forward to understanding the properties of the mysterious dark matter," said Marusa Bradac, a University of California, Santa Barbara researcher who leads the team that captured images of the collision.

"Dark matter makes up five times more matter in the universe than ordinary matter. This study confirms that we are dealing with a very different kind of matter, unlike anything that we are made of," he said.

It’s a dark matter

Meet our Role Model from the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory who studies the environment of space.