Tuesday 24 March 2020

cosmology - Is dark matter around the Milky Way spread in a spiral shape (or, in a different shape)?


Dark matter doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, but it, at least, participates in gravitational interactions as known from the discovery of dark matter. But does dark matter exist in a spiral shape around our galaxy?



Answer



In current cosmological models, the Milky Way resides in a 'halo' of dark matter. Halo is a technical term - in this case, it means a spherically symmetric collection of dark matter. Since dark matter is not self-interacting and does not interact with other matter, it doesn't experience any sort of collisions or friction, and therefore never flattens out into a disk the way normal (baryonic) matter does. So, dark matter does not trace out a disk and does not follow spiral arms.


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