Dark matter in the Milky Way

If the Newtonian inverse-square law is an appropriate description of gravity, then disk galaxies, and the Milky Way in particular, contain large amounts of dark matter: in general, the observed shapes of rotation curves do not correspond to the gravitational potential of the observed stars and gas. The nature of this dark matter is still a topic of debate, the outcome of which will have important consequences for our ideas of how galaxies and larger structures in the universe formed.