New research by Canadians with an international team at Chile’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope has produced a map of dark matter across a quarter of the sky
Gravity is an attractive force exerted by mass. In the century or so since Einstein proposed his theory about it, called general relativity, physicists have understood that gravity distorts the spacetime fabric of the universe. So when light passes mass, it bends. Light always moves in straight lines, but sometimes through a bent universe, following a course set by gravity’s distortions.
In Chile’s high altitude Atacama desert, the Canadian-built telescope can observe this glow, which appears in the dark spaces where it is not overpowered by light from Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way, which appears as a white halo. It is a map of dark matter. Importantly, it turns out to be mottled in appearance, reflecting what Hincks calls a “lumpiness” in the universe.
What this research shows is that observed lumpiness matches up with theoretically predicted lumpiness. That’s the stuff of discovery. “We’ve measured this lensing, and it matches up perfectly with what our theory predicts. So we understand it well,” Hincks said.Article content Why the universe should be lumpy, as opposed to uniform, is one of the grandest questions in modern science. The most popular answer involves a process called inflation, involving quantum effects at the smallest scale of matter during the rapid stretching of the early universe.
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