AKIPRESS.COM - An international team of scientists led by an Indian-American assistant professor of astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Sukanya Chakrabarti has discovered a new method that may help in detecting dwarf galaxies dominated by dark matter and explain ripples in the outer disk of the galaxy, Press Trust of India reports.
Just as seismologists analyse waves to infer properties about the Earth's interior, Sukanya Chakrabarti, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology here, uses waves in the galactic disk to map the interior structure and mass of galaxies.
This new method to characterize dark matter marks the first real application of the field of galactoseismology. Chakrabarti presented the findings at a press conference hosted by the American Astronomical Society meeting in Kissimmee on January 7. Her findings have been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters.