Tracing Dark Matter with Ripples in the Whirlpool Galaxy

A new paper presented at this week’s American Astronomical Society conference promises to shine some light, so to speak, on the pursuit of dark matter in individual galaxies. The current model of cold dark matter in the Universe is extremely successful when it comes to mapping the mysterious substance on large scales, but not on galactic and sub-galactic scales. Earlier today, Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti of Florida Atlantic University described a new way to map dark matter by observing ripples in the hydrogen disks of large galaxies. Her work may finally allow astronomers to use their observations of ordinary matter to probe the distribution of dark matter on smaller scales.
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Ancient Galaxies Fed On Gas, Not Collisions

The traditional picture of galaxy growth is not pretty. In fact, it’s a kind of cosmic cannibalism: two galaxies are caught in ominous tango, eventually melding together in a fiery collision, thus spurring on an intense but short-lived bout of star formation. Now, new research suggests that most galaxies in the early Universe increased their stellar populations in a considerably less violent way, simply by burning through their own gas over long periods of time.
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Cosmology in the Year One Trillion

Much of what is known today about the birth of the cosmos comes from astronomical observations at high redshifts. Due to the accelerated expansion of the Universe, however, astronomers of the future will be unable to use the same methods. In a trillion years or so, our own Milky Way galaxy will have merged with the Andromeda galaxy, creating a new galaxy that has been quaintly termed “Milkomeda.” All of our other galactic neighbors will have long disappeared beyond our cosmological horizon. Even the CMB will have been stretched into invisibility. So how will future Milkomedans study cosmology? How will they figure out where the Universe came from?
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Cosmology 101: The Present

Welcome back! Last time, we discussed the first few controversial and eventful moments following the birth of our cosmos. Looking around us today, we know that in the span of just a few billion years, the universe was transformed from that blistering amalgam of tiny elementary particles into a vast and organized expanse just teeming with large-scale structure. How does something like that happen?
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Full story at Universe Today