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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Photo: Dark Matter Helped Early Galaxies Survive "Massacre"


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Orange blobs mark the individual galaxies in the giant cluster CL0025+1654 in a "mass map" created using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The map shows otherwise invisible dark matter as a haze of blue.

Dark matter cocoons shielded some of the universe's first galaxies from being blasted away by radiation emitted by their neighbors' stars, according to a new computer model presented in July 2009.

Photograph courtesy J.-P. Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees, Caltech) et al., ESA, NASA