An invisible halo of misaligned dark matter could explain the warps at the Milky Way's edges.
Scientists initially believed that the Milky Way was a flat disk dominated by two spiral arms trailing stars from a central bar, but measurements taken since the mid-20th century reveal that it's bent inexplicably out of shape.
"These results, in combination with data in the stellar halo, provide compelling evidence that our Galaxy is embedded in a tilted dark matter halo," the researchers wrote in the study. The galactic halo — a vast sphere of stars floating like leaves on a dark matter pond — rests just beyond the spiral arms of the Milky Way. In a 2022 study, astronomers investigated this region using the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which maps the positions and movements of the Milky Way's roughly 2 billion stars. By poring through Gaia's data, they discovered that the stars suspended in the galactic halo were strangely off-kilter.
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