Summary: Thanks to new data, further theories of the nature of dark matter have been smashed to pieces! Pardon me for being excited about leading theories being wrong but that only means that I may have a part to play in developing the correct theory. So what has changed?
It turns out dark matter really doesn't seem to interact with anything apart from gravity. It doesn't even interact with itself. The study was conducted my using the Hubble and Chandra to look at collisions of different galaxies and watch the dark matter. Well, it looked at the gravitational lensing since dark matter itself is essentially impossible to see.
In the way science should work, Dr. Massey explains that "if you want to figure out what something is made out of, you knock it, or you throw it across the room and see where the bits go." The surprising part was that unlike the stars that slide past each other and the gas clouds that come to a halt in these collisions, the dark matter "seems not to interact with anything at all." Rather like a ghost, it just glides through the other dark matter like it's no big deal. Since it doesn't even interact with itself, many prominent theories for what dark matter is has now fallen apart. Which means exciting new possibilities for the rest of us in the future.
BBC News
Science Mag
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