An invisible ‘galactic lump’ of dark matter with a mass of 10million Suns causes nearby stars to disappear, scientists say
- A V-cluster of stars called the Hyades is being ‘torn apart’
- Scientists from the European Space Agency say the fault is a lump of darkness
- The browser with the naked eye can be seen at the head of Taurus constellation
Scientists believe that the star cluster closest to the Sun is torn apart by an invisible mass.
Researchers say the area known as the Hyades, a collection of V-shaped stars through the head of the Taurus constellation, is tearing it apart.
This collection is about 700 million years old and is located 153 light-years away from Earth at about 60 light-years across.
But the team says thousands more stars used to be mysteriously extinct.
A browser hit the Hyades star with an unprecedented 10million times larger than the Sun, scientists say
They believe this group encountered an unprecedented giant structure measuring about 10 million times the mass of the sun hundreds of millions of years ago that had to work to tear it apart.
One possible explanation is that it was a dark matter – an invisible cloud of grains believed to be memories from the creation of the Galaxy Milky Way.
The work was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this week.
Scientists led by Tereza Jerabkova of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Southern European Observatory made the discovery while studying the Hyades browser using data collected by ESA’s Gaia satellite.
Tereza said: ‘There must have been a close interaction with this horrible lump, and the Hyades just broke.
‘With Gaia, the way we see the Milky Way has changed completely. And with these findings, we will be able to map the Milky Way substructures much better than ever before. ‘
Star clusters naturally lose stars as they suddenly pull on each other which changes their speed, moving some to the edges of the cluster.
They can be swept out by the galaxy’s drag, forming two long tails called tidal tails.
Researchers say the area known as Hyades, a collection of V-shaped stars through the head of the Taurus constellation, is tearing it apart.
Deputy Tereza said: ‘We see stars belonging to the nearest star group moving in a way that they should not be moving if we apply our well – known and wide – ranging models.
‘Either these models are wrong and this would have a major impact on physics, or the trends are altered by a dark case lump, and this would also be an important finding.
‘This is the amazing thing about the data from the Gaia satellite – we have the opportunity, for the first time in history, to find stellar structures hidden in the vast majority of field stars in the constellation.’
But she did not rule that our Sun had the same thing as a previously unseen monster black hole, saying it is ‘fundamentally impossible’.