A small, faint galaxy residing some 65 million light-years away has been threatening to upend scientists’ entire paradigm of dark matter—the supposedly ubiquitous particles thought to pervade the universe like a hidden cosmic skeleton. All galaxies should be surrounded by a more massive cloud of dark matter, the thinking goes, but a team of astronomers thought they had discovered a unicorn—a galaxy where the stars and gas are the only matter there.
But the front-page discovery, published by Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and his colleagues in Nature, was not the end of the story. It generated passionate debate that erupted on social media. “It didn’t fit anybody’s expectations,” van Dokkum says. “And whenever you find something like that, suddenly you don’t have any friends.”
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