Shredded 'stellar streams' could lead to the Milky Way's missing dark matter

Shredded 'stellar streams' could lead to the Milky Way's missing dark matter

Vast rivers of stars swirl around the Milky Way, cutting against the current of our galaxy's halo in a complex gravitational dance. According to a new study of these so-called stellar streams, their offbeat orbits may be the key to uncovering the troves of invisible dark matter lurking within our galaxy.
In the study — which was accepted to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and is available to read on the preprint database arXiv.org — an international team of astronomers used observations from two telescopes to map the orbits, velocities, and compositions of 12 stellar streams crisscrossing the Milky Way.