Twirling in the Cold: The spins of Eris and Dysnomia
Way out beyond Neptune, a tiny moon dotes on a dwarf planet and slowly orbits around. But how much does the dwarf planet care? Quite a bit, it turns out.
Way out beyond Neptune, a tiny moon dotes on a dwarf planet and slowly orbits around. But how much does the dwarf planet care? Quite a bit, it turns out.
As Astrobites reported a couple of months ago, the Fermi-LAT gamma-ray telescope has reported an anomalous peak at 130 GeV, which could be the long-sought annihilation signature of dark matter. However, one of the strongest critiques of this potential discovery is that the signal is not coming from Sgr A*, the dynamical center of the Milky Way, but rather from about 200 parsecs away. Kuhlen et al. challenge the idea that the dark matter peak must be located at the dynamical center, and find that the combined dark matter-baryonic matter simulation Eris shows a well-defined, consistent offset between its dark matter peak and dynamical center.