Using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, scientists have created a detailed map of the distribution of dark matter across a quarter of the sky.
The diagram shows the mass distribution for regions. It uses the cosmic microwave background as the background for the dark matter portrait. The panel’s findings will be presented here Future science with CMB x LSS Conference in Kyoto, Japan.
“We have mapped invisible dark matter in the sky to great distances, and clearly see features of this invisible world across hundreds of millions of light-years,” said cosmologist Blake Sherwin of the University of Cambridge. Princeton University liberation. “It looks exactly as our theories predicted.”
Dark matter is a catch-all term for the material that makes up about 27% of the universe, but is not directly observable. Because of its gravitational effects, whatever it is, we only know that it exists.
People study dark matter through two main approaches: ground-based experiments and space-wide observations. There are Many experiments attempt to detect dark matter Among a sea of proposed dark matter candidates, this includes Axioms and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).
But dark matter’s only way is indirectly, where its gravitational effects are seen on a large scale. Enter the Atacama Astronomical Telescope The universe is dated in 2021 to be more precise. A diagram of the telescope is made at a A map of cosmic matter released earlier this year, which was produced using data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope. The map confirmed previous estimates of the ratio of normal matter to dark matter, and found that the distribution of matter is less skewed than previously thought.
The new diagram taps into Einstein’s enduring concern with general relativity: how the most massive objects in the universe, such as supermassive black holes, bend light from more distant sources. One such resource Cosmic Microwave BackgroundThe oldest detectable light comes from the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Researchers have effectively used background light to illuminate denser regions in the universe.
“It’s like a silhouette, but instead of having black in the shadow, you have texture and lumps of black matter, like light running through a fabric screen with lots of knots and bumps,” said Suzanne Stocks. , director of the Atacama Astronomical Telescope and a physicist at Princeton, in a university publication.
“The famous blue-and-yellow CMB image was a snapshot of what the universe looked like at a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now it gives information about all epochs,” Stacks added.
Recent analysis suggests that dark matter is lumpy enough to fit the standard model of cosmology, which relies on Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and co-author of the research that resulted in the February dark matter map, told Gizmodo in an email that his team’s map is sensitive to low-redshifts. the most recent universe). On the other hand, the new map focuses exclusively on the lensing of the cosmic microwave background.
“Said another way, our measures and the new ACT measures examine somewhat different (and complementary) aspects of subject distribution,” Baxter said. “Thus, instead of contradicting our previous results, the new results may provide an important new piece of the puzzle about potential conflicts with our standard cosmological model.”
“Perhaps the universe is less lumpy than expected at smaller scales and at more recent epochs (ie the regime probed by our analysis), but is consistent with expectations at earlier epochs and at larger scales,” Baxter added.
The new tools should help tease out the universe’s material distribution. The upcoming telescope at the Simons Observatory in Atacama is scheduled to begin operating in 2024 and will map the sky 10 times faster than the Atacama Astronomical Telescope. Princeton Publishing.
with The largest digital camera ever built About to be installed at the Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama, this is an exciting time for Earth-based laboratories.
Also: New dark matter theory suggests ‘dark big bang’ created hidden universe
