Using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, scientists have made a detailed map of the distribution of dark matter across a quarter of the sky.
The map shows the zonal distribution of masses basically extending as far as we can see in time; It uses the cosmic microwave background as the background for the dark matter image. Team research will be presented at Future Science with CMB x LSS Conference in Kyoto, Japan.
“We’ve mapped invisible dark matter across the sky to the greatest distances, and we clearly see the contours of this invisible world spanning hundreds of millions of light-years,” said Blake Sherwin, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge. Princeton University launch. “It looks just as our theories predict.”
Dark matter is an umbrella term for the stuff that makes up about 27% of the universe, but is not directly observable. We only know it exists, whatever it may be, because of its gravitational effects.
People probe dark matter through two main approaches: Earth-based experiments and comprehensive observations of the universe. there Lots of experiments trying to identify dark matter Amidst a sea of proposed dark matter candidates, which include Weakly interacting axions and massive particles (WIMPs).
But the only way dark matter is observed is indirectly, in the way that gravitational effects are observed on large scales. Enter the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, which Dating the universe with greater accuracy in 2021. The telescope map is based on a The Matter Map of the Universe was released earlier this year, which was produced using data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope. This map supported previous estimates of the ratio of normal matter to dark matter and found that the distribution of matter was less lumpy than previously thought.
The new map focuses on the ongoing interest in Einstein’s general relativity: how the most massive objects in the universe, such as supermassive black holes, scatter light from distant sources. One of these sources is Cosmic microwave backgroundthe oldest detectable light, which radiates from the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Researchers have effectively used the background as a backlight to illuminate denser regions of the universe.
“It’s a bit like shading, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light is streaming through a fabric curtain with lots of knots and bumps,” said Susan Staggs. , director of the Atacama Telescope cosmologist and physicist at Princeton University, in a university statement.
“The famous blue-and-yellow CMB image is a snapshot of what the universe was like at one epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this gives us information about all epochs since then,” Staggs added.
The latest analysis indicates that dark matter was clumpy enough to fit into the Standard Model of cosmology, which is based on Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Eric Baxter, a University of Hawaii astronomer and co-author of the research that resulted in the dark matter map in February, told Gizmodo in an email that his team’s map was sensitive to low redshifts (meaning close, in the younger universe). On the other hand, the newer map focuses exclusively on lensing the cosmic microwave background, which means a higher redshift and a more comprehensive scale.
“In another way, our new measurements and measurements are examining somewhat different (and complementary) aspects of matter distribution,” Baxter said. “Thus, rather than contradicting our previous results, the new findings may present an important new piece of the puzzle about potential inconsistencies with our standard cosmological model.”
“The universe may be less lumpy than expected on small and recent scales (that is, the system examined by our analysis), but it is consistent with expectations at earlier times and on larger scales,” added Baxter.
The new tools should help discover the distribution of matter in the universe. An upcoming telescope at the Simmons Observatory in Atacama is scheduled to begin operations in 2024 and will map the sky about 10 times faster than the Atacama Telescope for cosmology, according to Princeton launch.
with the The largest digital camera ever Slated for installation at the Vera Rubin Observatory, also in Atacama, it’s an exciting time for ground-based observatories.
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