"We are 99% confident that there is dark matter near the Sun,"
says the lead author Silvia Garbari of the University of Zurich.
"This could be the first evidence for a "disc" of dark matter in
our Galaxy, as recently predicted by theory and numerical
simulations of galaxy formation, or it could mean that the dark
matter halo of our galaxy is squashed, boosting the local dark
matter density." In the intervening decades, astronomers
developed a theory of dark matter and structure formation that
explains the properties of clusters and galaxies in the
Universe, but the amount of dark matter in the solar
neighbourhood has remained more mysterious. For decades after
Oort's measurement, studies found 3-6 times more dark matter
than expected. Then last year new data and a new method claimed
far less than expected. The community was left puzzled,
generally believing that the observations and analyses simply
weren't sensitive enough to perform a reliable measurement. An
international team lead by researchers of the Uni