What a new map of the universe tells us about dark matter

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This new map means we now have a new way to test advanced theories of gravity and quantum physics that try to explain what dark energy and dark matter could be.


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The full map so far of dark matter made by the Dark Energy Survey. Red regions have more dark matter than average, blue regions less dark matter. Picture: Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaborationSource:Supplied


What a new map of the universe tells us about dark matter

A NEW map of the universe reveals the distribution of a mysterious force and is set to give us a new way to test theories of gravity and quantum physics.

August 10, 2017

http://www.news.com.au/technology/s...r/news-story/20da6bcad019135eca8269935b3fb176

So if we saw anything unexpected in the warping of light from distant galaxies, we could have lent support to those theories. But the observations are consistent with our standard theory of general relativity, with no indication yet that gravity treats light any differently from matter.

We have found that our understanding of the universe is even more robust than many people had thought. We are really narrowing in on the range of possibilities for what dark matter and dark energy could be.

It looks like dark matter is a type of particle that is not part of our standard model of particle physics, and it seems that dark energy is consistent with being a “cosmological constant”, perhaps an intrinsic feature of the vacuum itself, which is why it appears so smooth and unchanging across the universe.

This week’s data release represents only the first year of data from the Dark Energy Survey. We are about to begin our fifth year of observing, and our final analysis will cover three times as much area with 300 million galaxies.
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