COSMIC JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH?: He was born in a crossfire hurricane. This article says our solar system will soon encounter a dark matter hurricane.

Last year, the motions of nearby stars in the solar neighbourhood were measured by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite and a previously unknown stream, dubbed S1, was detected – the telltale remains of a smaller dwarf galaxy cannibalised by the Milky Way. Now a study published in the journal Physical Review D, led by Ciaran O’Hare from the University of Zaragoza in Spain, finds that 10 billion solar masses worth of dark matter from that galaxy is travelling along S1, directly towards the Sun.

This dark matter should strike the Sun – and any detectors on Earth – at speeds of 500 kilometres per second – much faster than the standard dark matter wind. O’Hare and colleagues call it a “dark matter hurricane”.

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