It seems as if one of the biggest focuses in the last couple years has been the search for dark matter. Scientists believe that they know the mysterious invisible matter is there, but are having a terrible time actually proving it with a reasonable certainty. It isn’t exactly just darkness like you would see if you were hiding under your tonneau cover on your truck, but actual dense matter that pulls on everything around it.
A new map reveals dense pools of invisible matter tipping the scales at 10 trillion times the mass of the sun and housing a cosmic city of ancient galaxies according to Space.com
The map, presented last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, provides indirect evidence for so-called dark matter and how this mysterious substance affects galaxy formation.
That’s the key word, however. “Indirect” evidence. Based on the effects of the gravitational forces observed, and the effect it has on light measurements where this invisible matter is supposed to be, scientists have theorized that there is certainly dark matter in the area pulling on everything around it.
“The dark matter halos are what allow the galaxies to form in the first place. The dark matter is the underlying skeleton of the universe,” said Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, who was part of the map-making team. “Most of the universe is dark matter. Galaxies are just froth on this ocean of dark matter.”
Gray, Catherine Heymans of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and colleagues used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe a supercluster called Abell 901/902, which resides 2.6 billion light-years from Earth and spans more than 16 million light-years across.
The astrophysicists measured light from a backdrop of more than 60,000 galaxies after it passed through the supercluster and its dark matter. According to Einstein’s general relativity theory, the presence of matter can bend spacetime, deflecting the path of a light ray passing through the mass.
“Dark matter leaves a signature in distant galaxies” explained study co-author Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia. “For example, a circular galaxy will become more distorted to resemble the shape of a banana if its light passes near a dense region of dark matter.”
The new map of dark matter is considered another piece of the puzzle that may someday help prove there is actually something out there called “Dark MAtter”:
“The new map of the underlying dark matter in the supercluster is one key piece of this puzzle,” Gray said. “At the same time, we’re looking in detail at the galaxies themselves.”