ASTRONOMERS DISCOVERED THE EARLIEST KNOWN DARK MATTER -- AND IT'S NOT BEHAVING AS PREDICTED

[Judi Lynn]

For the first time, scientists used the radiation residue of the Big Bang to measure dark matter around extremely distant galaxies.

JEFF NAGLE
6 HOURS AGO

EVEN THOUGH it’s impossible to see it, dark matter fills the universe. And now, it seems increasingly likely it always has. An international team from Japan used the Subaru Telescope at the controversial Mauna Kea Observatories complex to discover the earliest dark matter ever observed by tracing how it distorts measurements of the halos of millions of the oldest and most distant galaxies in the universe.

In a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, the team reports the earliest subtle traces of dark matter’s influence on galaxies in the young universe. They made the discovery after observing 1.5 million incredibly distant galaxies and their dark matter halos, peering back as far as 12 billion years.



The Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii.OsakaWayne Studios/Moment/Getty Images

WHAT’S NEW — For the first time, these cosmologists show it is possible to use the cosmic microwave background itself — the radiation residue of the Big Bang — to measure halos of dark matter around extremely distant galaxies. As the mass of closer, more recent galaxies and their attendant dark matter bend the microwave background, astronomers can pick up on subtle fluctuations in the radiation to indirectly observe dark matter.

Andrés Plazas Malagón, one of the study team members and a researcher at Princeton University and the Vera Rubin Observatory in northern Chile, tells Inverse that looking at just one galaxy might not reveal much distortion at all. So the team combined observations of 1.5 million galaxies and the ring of dark matter surrounding each one to find a clearer signal.

More:
https://www.inverse.com/science/dark-matter-early-universe

[MuseRider]

1. How cool.

I know nothing about any of this but it is so interesting.

Do they still allow tours of the place? You could not go in, obviously, but we were able to walk around until it got too hard to breathe. It felt like going to the moon, the landscape was really cool.

I wish I understood more of this but what they are finding these days is fascinating even if you do not really understand it.