A recent survey of the solar system found far less dark matter than previous estimates. From Nature:
In their survey, Christian Moni Bidin of the University of Concepcion in Chile and his colleagues used the European Southern Observatory’s 2.2-metre telescope in La Silla and three other telescopes to weigh, in effect, an extended volume of space centred around the Sun. Although this area cannot be measured directly, the total mass within the volume can be inferred by its influence on the motions of stars that are passing through.
The researchers measured the velocity of more than 400 stars within 4,000 parsecs (13,000 light years) of the Sun in a limited volume — a 15-degree cone — below the flattened disk of the Milky Way Galaxy, and then used those observations to extrapolate the velocities of stars on the other side of the disk, above the plane. This volume is approximately four times greater than that surveyed by other teams in previous studies.
The researchers found that at most, only about one-tenth the amount of dark matter predicted by models could exist in the volume of space they examined, Moni Bidin says.
