- 3651 - DARK MATTER - not as predicted? Astronomers have discovered the earliest known dark matter and it is not behaving as predicted. Scientists used the radiation residue of the Big Bang to measure dark matter around extremely distant galaxies.
--------------------- 3651 - DARK MATTER - not as predicted?
- It’s impossible to see it, but dark matter fills the universe. The Subaru Telescope at the controversial Mauna Kea Observatories complex was used 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.
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- They made this discovery after observing 1,500,000 incredibly distant galaxies and their dark matter halos, peering back as far as 12 billion years. 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.
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- 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.
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- Looking at just one galaxy might not reveal much distortion at all. The astronomers combined observations of 1.5 million galaxies and the ring of dark matter surrounding each one to find a clearer signal.
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- This investigation uses data from the cosmic microwave background rather than observing how light and radiation from more distant galaxies are influenced by nearer galaxies. The team observed dark matter from the first 1.7 billion years of the universe's existence. The discovery tells us that the earliest galaxies had halos of dark matter even as they first formed.
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- Dark matter cannot be directly observed and its role in the universe is a mystery. Yet the substance is believed to make up a quarter of all existence. 25% of the Universe. To better understand it, astronomers compare observations of our local universe with measurements of extremely distant and old objects.
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- Surprisingly, the dark matter observed in this study isn’t behaving the way the scientists had predicted based on what we know about the laws of physics, and in particular, the Standard Model, which offers a framework for characterizing all matter in the universe.
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- The best existing measurements of the cosmic microwave background were established by the ESA’s Planck mission a decade ago. And while it didn’t measure dark matter directly, the measurements set certain constraints on what physicists expect should be there.
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- According to a popular cosmology theory called the standard “Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model“, dark matter should form locally dense clumps as a result of the random fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background and gravity. Instead, the team found early dark matter is less clumpy than expected.
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- For now, 2022, this analysis only involved a third of the galactic dataset collected by the Subaru Telescope. Astronomers could keep looking through the full dataset and other existing observations for traces of dark matter in extremely large samples of galaxies.
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- When the Vera Rubin Observatory in northern Chile starts observing the sky in 2023, it will be the largest digital camera in the world. This means that it will capture billions and billions of galaxies, not the relatively mere millions captured by the Subaru Telescope or even the James Webb Space Telescope.
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- If you’re a good scientist, you want to break your model.
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August 15, 2022 DARK MATTER - not as predicted? 3651
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