A huge collision between two clusters of galaxies has provided the first direct evidence of the existence of the universe’s mysterious dark matter, researchers said recently.
The impact forced apart dark and normal matter, offering the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark, researchers said.
"We’ve come closer than ever to seeing this invisible matter," University of Arizona researcher Doug Clowe, a leader of the study, said in a statement.
"This provides the first direct proof that dark matter must exist and must make up the majority of the matter in the universe," Clowe said in a telephone news conference.
Scientists realised decades ago that galaxies rotated much faster than their mass should allow, giving rise to the idea that invisible dark matter keeps them from flying apart.
The new evidence of dark matter’s existence was discovered with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and the Magellan optical telescopes, researchers said.
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