A Dark Matter Hurricane is headed our way

I stumbled across this article on the CNN news website.  I won't put it all here, just the gist of it:


A dark matter hurricane is headed our way

By Don Lincoln   posted on CNN

"According to a recent paper, the Earth is caught directly in the crosshairs of a cosmic hurricane. A swarm of nearly 100 stars, accompanied by an even greater amount of dark matter, is aimed directly at our stellar neighborhood and there's nothing we can do to stop it; in fact, the vanguard is already upon us.

.... But is it a danger? Well, actually, no. Not at all. But it's potentially incredibly fascinating, with lots of interesting scientific interconnections. So, what is really going on?


...One of them, called S1 (for stream 1), consists of nearly 100 stars of similar age and composition, orbiting the Milky Way in a direction exactly opposite that of normal stars. It's kind of like a handful of cars driving the wrong way down the highway, except with a much greater distance between them and with no likelihood of a collision. These stars are spread out over a few thousand light years and they will pass through the solar system's neighborhood over the course of a few million years.''


I have no idea what this means.  To compound my mystified mind,  I found this snippet from a 2013 article in the Atlantic monthly by author Megan Garber:

You're Interacting With Dark Matter Right Now   

... But scientists have no idea how.

 

"Hold up your hand.

Now put it back down.

In that window of time, your hand somehow interacted with dark matter -- the mysterious stuff that comprises the vast majority of the universe. "Our best guess," according to Dan Hooper, an astronomy professor at the University of Chicago and a theoretical astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, "is that a million particles of dark matter passed through your hand just now."


There's a poem in here somewhere.