Ancient stars could help determine dark matter’s velocity

The speed of dark matter particles moving through the universe is a vital property that will help astronomers better characterize this mysterious material. Researchers have been trying to collect measurements of dark matter’s speed for years, but no attempts have successfully detected the invisible matter’s velocity. In a new effort to get some answers, a team of researchers took a new approach and tried to determine its speed through a computer simulation, rather than observation.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Ancient stars could help determine dark matter’s velocity

The speed of dark matter particles moving through the universe is a vital property that will help astronomers better characterize this mysterious material. Researchers have been trying to collect measurements of dark matter’s speed for years, but no attempts have successfully detected the invisible matter’s velocity. In a new effort to get some answers, a team of researchers took a new approach and tried to determine its speed through a computer simulation, rather than observation.

more…

> “Our hypothesis was that there’s some subset of stars that, for some reason, will match the movements of the dark matter,”

Hmm. More reliable, and already calculated, is the size of the dark matter halo as inferred from the orbital speeds of nearby dwarf galaxies. The size of the the halo gives the speed of dark matter in exactly the same way that the size of the solar system gives the speed of planets.

What they’re really looking for is stars with an orbit similar to the known orbit of the dark matter halo. That would tell us a lot more about the formation history of the first stars in the galaxy than it would about dark matter.