Dark matter "wrecking ball" may have hit Milky Way

Darth Vader's Death Star? Ming the Merciless and his war rockets? The awesome power of Chuck Norris?

Piffle, suggests one astrophysicist, at least when it comes to explaining what force could have permanently bent a ring in our Milky Way Galaxy within the last 60 million years. The real explanation may be the power of an invisible wrecking ball made of dark matter — a cloud of the enigmatic physics particles born in the fiery aftermath of the Big Bang and weighing as much as 10 million suns.

Left behind by this "Dark Matter Clump" cataclysm was a tilted swirl of newborn stars circling within the galaxy called the " Gould Belt," which incidentally may have sent comets hurtling towards Earth, suggests astrophysicist Kenji Bekki of Australia's University of New South Wales in a recent Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.

In the study, Bekki offered a new explanation for the Gould Belt, which 19th-Century astronomers first noted. It circles more than 3,000 light years outside the center of the Milky Way (where a light year equals 5.9 trillion miles) at a 20-degree tilt from the galaxy's rotating spiral arms. In 1997, the astronomer W. G. L. Poppel pointed out that astronomers could not explain where all its young stars, perhaps 2 million of them less than 60 million years old, came from using common explanations of star formation.

"The point is that the sun is immersed in the Gould Belt," Poppel added, suggesting we might want to know how all these young stars came to surround our 4.6 billion-year-old sun.