An excess of small-scale gravitational lenses observed in galaxy clusters

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In a recently published paper Meneghetti et al. (2020) in Science, she and her collaborators report a new gap – an order of magnitude discrepancy – revealed using a precision metric  – the cross-section for galaxy-galaxy strong lensing, between cold dark matter simulations and observed cluster lenses. This suggests that there is a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models, or there is a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties.

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