Dark matter just became even more mysterious

Dark matter just became even more mysterious Today’s Video of the Day from NASA Goddard describes a puzzling new discovery in the way that dark matter behaves in space. 

In a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, dark matter distorts and magnifies the space surrounding large galaxy clusters.

The scientists found that across three different galaxy clusters, the concentration of dark matter was so immense that the galaxies produced lensing effects ten times stronger than what was expected.  Dark matter just became even more mysterious as shown in the video above, showing the difference in changes and the large clusters.

Dark matter cannot be directly seen because it is composed of particles that do not absorb, reflect, or emit light. This material makes up about 85 percent of the Universe. Although the existence of dark matter is generally accepted by the scientific community,  some astrophysicists, intrigued by certain observations which are not well-explained by standard dark matter, argue for various modifications of the standard laws of general relativity, such as modified Newtonian dynamics, tensor–vector–scalar gravity, or entropic gravity. These models attempt to account for all observations without invoking supplemental non-baryonic matter.

Video Credit: NASA Goddard 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer