14 DAY TRIAL // A team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have recently announced that they were unable to find any signs of dark matter around the Sun. Their findings caused a lot of controversy, and now another group is arguing that the study was flawed from the get-go.
Institute for Advanced Study investigators Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine say that ESO research was carried out on faulty premises, as well as on a few mistaken assumptions about how stars neighboring the Sun travel in respect to the galactic plane.
“The main error is that they assume that the mean azimuthal (or rotational) velocity of their tracer population is independent of Galactocentric cylindrical radius at all heights. This assumption is not supported by the data,” the team says in a new study, according to Universe Today.
If we take the new data into account, then the ESO analysis does reveal dark matter around the Sun, in concentrations similar to those proposed by the most widely accepted cosmological models.