Dark matter's odd behavior baffles astronomers

"This result is a puzzle," said astronomer James Jee, project scientist in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Davis, who led the Hubble study. "Dark matter is not behaving as predicted, and it's not obviously clear what is going on. Theories of galaxy formation and dark matter must explain what we are seeing."

During the collision of galaxy clusters that formed Abell 520, the dark matter collected into a "dark core" containing far fewer galaxies than would be expected if the dark matter and galaxies hung together. Most of the galaxies apparently have sailed far away from the collision.

Current theories of dark matter predict that galaxies should be anchored to the invisible substance, even during the shock of a collision. The initial observations, made in 2007, were so unusual that astronomers shrugged them off as the result of poor data.

Dark matter is thought to be the gravitational "glue" that holds galaxies together. The mysterious invisible substance is not made of the same kind of matter that makes up stars, planets and people. Astronomers know little about dark matter, yet it accounts for most of the universe's mass. They have deduced dark matter's existence by observing its ghostly gravitational influence on normal matter.

One way to study dark matter is by analyzing smashups between galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the universe. When galaxy clusters collide, astronomers expect the galaxies to tag along with the dark matter. Clouds of intergalactic gas, however, plow into one another, slow down, and lag behind the impact.

But studies of Abell 520 have shown that dark matter's behavior may not be so simple. The original observations found that the system's core was rich in dark matter and hot gas but contained no luminous galaxies, which normally would be seen in the same location as the dark matter. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory detected the hot gas. Astronomers used the Canada-France-Hawaii and Subaru telescopes atop Mauna Kea to infer the location of the dark matter by measuring how the mysterious substance bends light from more distant background galaxies, an effect called gravitational lensing.

The astronomers then turned to Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to help bail them out of their cosmic conundrum. Instead, to their chagrin, the Hubble observations helped confirm the earlier findings. Astronomers used Hubble to map the dark matter in the cluster through the gravitational lensing technique.

"Observations like those of Abell 520 are humbling in the sense that in spite of all the leaps and bounds in our understanding, every now and then, we are stopped cold," explained Arif Babul of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the team's senior theorist.

Is Abell 520 an oddball or is the prevailing picture of dark matter flawed? Jee thinks it's too soon to tell.

The team has proposed a half-dozen explanations for the findings, but each is unsettling for astronomers. "It's pick your poison," said team member Andisheh Mahdavi of San Francisco State University in California, who led the original Abell 520 observations in 2007. One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that Abell 520 was a more complicated interaction than the Bullet Cluster encounter. Abell 520 may have formed from a collision between three galaxy clusters, instead of just two colliding systems, as in the case of the Bullet Cluster.

Another scenario is that some dark matter may be what astronomers call "sticky." Like two snowballs smashing together, normal matter slams into each other during a collision and slows down. But dark matter blobs are thought to pass through each other during an encounter without slowing down. This scenario proposes that some dark matter interacts with itself and stays behind when galaxy clusters collide.

A third possibility is that the core contained many galaxies, but they were too dim to be seen, even by Hubble. Those galaxies would have formed dramatically fewer stars than other normal galaxies.

Armed with the Hubble data, the group hopes to create a computer simulation to try to reconstruct the collision, hoping that it yields some answers to dark matter's weird behavior.

For images and more information about Abell 520's dark core, visit: http://hubblesite.org/news/2012/10 andhttp://www.nasa.gov/hubble.