Astronomers mapped the motions of hundreds of stars in the Milky Way in order to deduce the amount of dark matter that must be tugging on them from the vicinity of our sun. Their surprising conclusion? There's no dark matter around here.
As the researchers write in a forthcoming paper in the Astrophysical Journal, the stellar motion implies that the stars, all within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system — the sun, planets and surrounding gas and dust — and not by any unseen matter.
"Our calculations show that [dark matter] should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!" said lead study author Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at the University of Concepción in Chile.
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