A groundbreaking new image depicts how enigmatic dark matter is distributed

Cosmologists have created this detailed map of dark matter to understand universe expansion.

Mrigakshi Dixit

| Apr 11, 2023 09:08 AM EST

Created: Apr 11, 2023 09:08 AM EST

science

The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang

Mark Devlin, Deputy Director of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Reese Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania

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The cosmic universe is riddled with mysteries scientists have been attempting to unravel for centuries. Dark matter is one such perplexing problem, and understanding it could help us learn more about the universe's evolution and structure.

Now, researchers have created a detailed map of invisible dark matter using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). The groundbreaking new image depicts enigmatic dark matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky. The creation of this map confirms Albert Einstein's theory of how colossal cosmic structures grow and curve light across the span of 14 billion years of the universe.

“We have mapped the invisible dark matter across the sky to the largest distances, and clearly see features of this invisible world that are hundreds of millions of light-years across. It looks just as our theories predict,” said Blake Sherwin, professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, and the lead of the ACT group, in a statement.

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Over 160 researchers examined data from the National Science Foundation's ACT.

A groundbreaking new image depicts how enigmatic dark matter is distributed — The Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Northern Chile
Mark Devlin, Deputy Director of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Reese Flower Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania

However, it was a tricky task to document the features of the dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of the universe. Because dark matter does not interact with light or other types of electromagnetic radiation, it is difficult to study. Gravity is the only thing that could reveal information about dark matter.

For this purpose, the team observed the distortion of leftover light from the Big Bang — when the universe was only 380,000 years old. This type of diffuse light travels freely throughout the universe and is known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

The team examined “the gravitational pull of large, heavy structures including dark matter warps the CMB on its 14-billion-year journey to us, like how a magnifying glass bends light as it passes through its lens,” explains the statement.

Furthermore, this research adds to the ongoing debate about "The Crisis in Cosmology," which focuses on the discrepancy in measuring the age of the universe and requires knowledge of the rate of expansion. The crisis stems from different measurements of background light rather than the CMB. These deviations suggested that dark matter was not lumpy enough in the standard model of cosmology and that the model was inaccurate.

“Remarkably, it provides measurements that show that both the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe and the rate at which it is growing after 14 billion years of evolution, are just what you’d expect from our standard model of cosmology based on Einstein's theory of gravity,” said Mathew Madhavacheril, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania.

This research will be presented at the "Future Science with CMB x LSS" conference, which will be held from April 10-14 at Kyoto University.