MILKY WAY — Something strange is blasting holes in the Milky Way, but we're not really sure what.<br /><br />Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Ana Bonaca presented findings at the American Physical Society conference of a series of holes in GD-1, our galaxy's longest stellar stream.<br /><br />According to Physics, stellar streams like GD-1 are remnants of star clusters or dwarf galaxies that have been ensnared by our galaxy, and stretched out while being drawn into its orbit.<br /><br />Under normal conditions, the stream is a single line. But a high-resolution map of GD-1 created from Gaia observatory data revealed gaps in the stream, along with a spur — a thorn-like structure that had not been seen before.<br /><br />Bonaca and her colleagues believe something large plunged through the stream, but couldn't map it to any of the luminous objects they observed.<br /><br />They suspect the culprit to be a clump of dark matter, but need more evidence to support the theory, or to rule out other possibilities.<br /><br />The team wants to conduct more mapping work to uncover other areas where the unseen object has come a-knocking, with the eventual goal being to map dark matter clumps all across our galaxy.
