Discovery Of A Mysterious Object In The Distant Universe With A Huge Mass

The body’s age is estimated at about 6.5 billion years.

The study is based on the analysis of the bending of light coming from a distant galaxy, caused by the gravitational influence of an invisible mass, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. According to astronomer Devon Powell, searching for dark objects is a difficult task, and distant galaxies are used as background lighting for this purpose.

The object may be either a halo of stars surrounding an ultra-dense dwarf galaxy, or an exotic structure of dark matter with a black hole in the centre. The research team leans toward the hypothesis of a dense halo of dark matter.

The researchers used a network of radio telescopes, including the Green Bank Telescope and the Earth-sized VLBI array, which enabled them to detect weak distortions in light.

The object is located about 10 billion light-years from Earth, which corresponds to the era in which the universe was about 6.5 billion years old. Its mass is less than that of similar objects, making it the least massive in this category.

The structure of the body is characterized by high concentration, with the central part containing a quarter of the mass, while the outer part is spread out in a disc-like formation. Processing the data required special algorithms and supercomputers, and the gravitational imaging method was able to match light distortions to the object’s invisible mass.

The data are consistent with theories of cold dark matter, but the structure of the object differs from typical expectations, as the center was denser than expected. This could be the result of a self-reaction of dark matter, which could lead to the collapse of the corona and the formation of a black hole.

The discovery of this object opens a new page in the study of dark matter and embedded systems. This object is the third space object discovered using the gravitational imaging method, and the first whose properties have been measured with extreme precision. The team continues to study other areas of the sky in search of similar objects.

Source: Naukatv.ru