Researchers at the University of Zurich have claimed that Zwicky's theory of sun being surrounded by a dark matter is 99 percent certain and correct.
In 1930, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky had come up with the theory that clusters of galaxies were filled with a mysterious dark matter that kept them from flying apart. Another scientist Jan Oort from the Netherlands had discovered that the density of matter near the sun was twice the presence of stars and gas alone, Daily Mail reported.
In a new research using an unbiased technique, scientists have obtained new measures of the local dark matter density.
"We are 99 per cent confident that there is dark matter near the Sun," the daily quoted the lead author Silvia Garbari as saying.
"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," Garbari said.
The international team of researchers was apparently not satisfied with the techniques used over past two decades and found them biased in terms of estimating the accurate amount of dark matter in the universe.
Hence, they devised a new technique and applied it to the position and velocities of scores of orange K dwarf stars near the Sun, to determine the précised answer from the simulated data.
"Knowing the local properties of dark matter is the key to revealing just what kind of particle it consists of," Co-author Prof. George Lake told the daily.
"Experimental physicists hope to capture just a few of these particles each year in experiments like XENON and CDMS currently in operation," Lake said.
"If dark matter is a fundamental particle, billions of these particles will have passed through your body by the time your finish reading this article," he added.
