Recent X-ray observations from NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows a galaxy called NGC 720 is enveloped in a slightly flattened cloud of hot gas that has an orientation different from that of the optical image of the galaxy. "The shape and orientation of the hot gas cloud require it to be confined by an egg shaped dark matter halo," said David Buote of the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of a report on this research in the Sept. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "This means that dark matter is not just an illusion due to a shortcoming of the standard theory of gravity -- it is real."   The conclusion assumes that the hot gas cloud has not been overly disturbed by collisions or mergers with other galaxies in the last 100 million years. NGC 720 is about 80 million light years from Earth.
    There have been no other observations to this effect and no proof that a collision did not occur, which would be the most likely possibility in a non evolutionary universe, such as a modified steady-state universe undergoing mass decrement, such as in the contracting universe model.  However, since the final tally has not been taken between these vastly different cosmological models, either possibility exists;  a singular event disturbance being the most probable generally speaking.