'Cosmic dandruff' mystery solved

Recent discoveries made with CSIRO's Parkes telescope appear to have settled a 40-year-old controversy about the nature of gas clouds that surround our Milky Way Galaxy.

Small 'high-velocity' clouds of hydrogen gas seen outside our Galaxy are mostly scraps shed by satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, researchers say - a kind of cosmic dandruff. They are not the missing clumps of dark matter predicted by the 'cold dark matter' theory of galaxy formation.

Added by Andrew Wright on 2003-05-06