NOVEMBER 26, 1999
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THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA NOVEMBER 26, 1999 |
| A research paper that unlocks some of the mystery of the universe’s “dark matter” co-authored by Dr. Julio Navarro (physics and astronomy), visiting Lansdowne lecturer Dr. Simon White of the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics, and Dr. Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham, England is currently among the most widely-cited studies in the field of physics and astronomy.
According to the November/December issue of the U.S.-based research magazine ScienceWatch, the paper was cited 24 times by other researchers published between July and August. The citations place it in a tie for fourth on the magazine’s “What’s Hot in Physics” chart. Navarro calls it “flattering” to be so highly ranked. The paper (“A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering”) was originally released in The Astrophysical Journal in December 1997 when Navarro was a Bart J. Bok fellow at the University of Arizona. In total, the paper has been cited 73 times to date. Dark matter — the invisible mass that may be 99 per cent of the matter in the universe — is one of the fundamental unresolved problems in astronomy. Scientists do know that dark matter forms massive halos that surround galaxies. Navarro and collaborators employed numerical models to show that these halos all look the same from galaxy to galaxy. Unlike other structures in the universe, the halos take an identical shape and don’t depend on their particular mass or other parameters that typically dictate how structures in the universe form and evolve. The findings have been backed up by direct observational tests. “It is difficult to imagine a simpler solution,” the paper concludes. “(Dark matter) halos of all masses … look the same, and their characteristic densities are just proportional to the cosmic density at the time they ‘formed.’” |