By Ron Cowen
From Atlanta at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society
Talk about a death shroud. The corpses of 150 billion stars may blanket the visible disk of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.
Astronomers made this novel proposal to explain results they obtained when they monitored millions of stars in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. These observations sought the identity of some of the Milky Way’s unseen material, or dark matter, believed to account for at least 90 percent of its mass.