The face of the gaur in the rear constellation Taurus is severely distorted by the attack of an invisible monster made of ancient dark matter.
The study, published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, used the European Space Agency (ESA) star mapping satellite to investigate the history of Hyades, a V-shaped cluster located in the constellation Taurus, located on the face of the gaur the constellation has drawn on the sky.
Speaking on Live Science, ESA’s Dr Tereza Jerabkova, lead author of the study, said it was a cluster of stars around 600-700 million years old, made up of several hundred stars and 150 light years away from us. One of the stars in the main cluster is Epsilon Tauri, the “Gaur’s Eye” star, which is extremely bright and resembles the eye part of Taurus.
This nascent cluster is still radically changing its shape due to the impact of gravity from other nearby clusters and objects. The researchers targeted two “tidal tails” of the cluster. One branch towards the center of the galaxy contains Earth the Milky Way, the other splits to give the cluster a unique V-shape.
They found that in these branches, as the stars got older and more massive, they jostled other young stars and pushed them all towards the edge of the cluster as if there was some invisible attraction. There, the stars are sensitive to external gravity, gradually leave the orbit of the cluster and … dissolve in space, as if a monster were swallowing them.
This monster is a huge invisible mass of ancient dark matter that was left behind by the creation of the Milky Way. The dark matter cluster is estimated to have a mass equal to 10 million suns.
According to Dr Jerabkova, this not only explains the distortion of the posterior constellation Taurus in the sky, but also shows that mapping the stars of Gaia could reveal not only the stars and planets, but also help determine the invisible structures that form the basis of the universe. Previous studies from NASA estimate that dark matter makes up at least 27% of the mass of the entire universe, but we can’t see them.
