Dark Matter 'Hairs' May Surround Earth

Earth may sport a thick coat of super long dark matter "hairs," a new study suggests.

Astronomers think dark matter — a mysterious, invisible substance that neither emits nor absorbs light, and is about six times more common than "normal" matter — forms fine-grained but incredibly long streams throughout the universe.

"A stream can be much larger than the solar system itself, and there are many different streams crisscrossing our galactic neighborhood," study author Gary Prézeau, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

Prézeau performed computer simulations that looked at what happens when such streams go through Earth and other planets in the solar system. (Dark matter doesn't interact much with normal matter, so the mysterious stuff can zoom through planets' interiors.) He found that these worlds' gravity likely bends the streams into narrow hairs, complete with dense "roots" and more diffuse "tips."

In the case of Earth, the root of such hairs would lie about 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from the planet's surface, while the tip would be about twice as far away — 1.2 million miles (2 million km) from Earth. (For perspective, the moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 239,000 miles, or 385,000 km).

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