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We present new deep near-infrared images of dark clouds in the Perseus molecular complex. These images show beautiful extended emission which we model as scattered ambient starlight and name ``cloudshine. The brightness and color variation of cloudshine complicates the production of extinction maps, the best tracer of column density in clouds. However, since the profile of reflected light is essentially a function of mass distribution, cloudshine provides a new way to study the structure of dark clouds. Previous work has used optical scattered light to study the density profile of tenuous clouds; extending this technique into the infrared provides a high-resolution view into the interiors of very dense clouds, bypassing the complexities of using thermal dust emission, which is biased by grain temperature, or molecular tracers, which have complicated depletion patterns. As new wide-field infrared cameras are used to study star-forming regions at greater depth, cloudshine will be widely observed and should be seen as a new high-resolution tool, rather than an inconvenience.
Dark matter, proposed decades ago as a speculative component of the universe, is now known to be the vital ingredient in the cosmos, eight times more abundant than ordinary matter, one quarter of the total energy density and the component which has c
Dark sectors, consisting of new, light, weakly-coupled particles that do not interact with the known strong, weak, or electromagnetic forces, are a particularly compelling possibility for new physics. Nature may contain numerous dark sectors, each wi
Some extensions of the Standard Model provide Dark Matter candidate particles with sub-GeV mass. These Light Dark Matter particles have been considered for example in Warm Dark Matter scenarios (e.g. the keV scale sterile neutrino, axino or gravitino
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Despite the great success of the Standard Model of particle physics the nature of Dark Matter still remains unclear. Recently, the idea of the existence of a hidden sector coupling only weakly with the ordinary matter was revitalized and gained popul