Overview
- A UC Riverside–led paper in Physical Review Letters links three long-standing anomalies to self-interacting dark matter and calls for targeted follow-up.
- The study says dark-matter particles can collide and trade energy, driving gravothermal collapse that builds compact cores about a million times the Sun’s mass.
- The model reproduces a sharp distortion in the gravitational lens JVAS B1938+666 that signals an unseen dense object bending light.
- It explains the spur-and-gap pattern in the Milky Way’s GD-1 stellar stream as the track of a compact, invisible perturber.
- It accounts for the unusually tight Fornax 6 star cluster, while noting the standard collisionless model struggles with such dense structures.