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Telescopes and space missions

Telescopes and space missions

Has Hubble seen dark matter?

04 Oct 1999

The Hubble Space Telescope might have "photographed" some of the missing mass of the universe. A team of astronomers has compared the 1995 Hubble Deep Field image - a continuous ten-day exposure of a small area of the sky - with an image of the same region taken in 1997. Two very faint objects appear to be moving, and the astronomers argue that they could be white dwarfs. These small, but very dense, stars are leading candidates for the "dark matter" in our galaxy (Astrophysical Journal October 20 524 L95). It is known that over 90% of the mass in our galaxy is dark or invisible because the galaxy rotates much faster than can be explained by the gravitational influence of the stars and gas that we can see.

When the astronomers – Rodrigo Ibata from the European Southern Observatory, Harvey Richer and

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