The researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to recalculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there is about six times as much dark matter as normal matter in the universe, a finding consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also discovered that the subject was less clustered than previously thought; face related to three The articles were all published this week in Physical Review D.
This Dark Energy Research observes photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope It looks at light at microwave wavelengths. This means that the South Pole Telescope is observing the cosmic microwave background, the oldest radiation we can see, dating back to about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented the datasets from the respective surveys in two sky maps; they then superimposed the two maps to get the full picture of how matter is distributed throughout the universe.
“Assuming our standard cosmological model is tied to the early universe, there appears to be slightly less fluctuation in the current universe than we might have anticipated,” said astronomer Eric Baxter of the University of Hawaii. Research at a university release. “The high precision and robustness of the sources of bias of the new results present a particularly compelling case that we may have begun to uncover gaps in our standard cosmological model.”
G/O Media may receive commissions
Dark matter something in the universe that we cannot directly observe. We know it’s there due to gravitational effects, but otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see it. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, according to CERN. (Ordinary matter is about 5% of the total content of the universe.) The remaining 68% consists of dark energy, which is a hitherto obscure category and is evenly distributed throughout the universe and is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to analyze, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently being taken by the South Pole Telescope. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently taking a high-precision sweep of the background. With new sensitive data to examine, Researchers can put cosmological standard model for a difficult test.
Atacama in 2021 telescope helped scientists come up with and new precision measurement for the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. Further questioning of the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers deal with the Hubble tension, a conflict between the two best ways to measure the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, the researchers come up with two different figures for this expansion rate.)
As observation tools become more precise and more data is collected and analysed, this information can be fed back into major cosmological models to determine where we went wrong in the past and to point us in new lines of research.
Read more: Physicists Say Antimatter Could Easily Travel Through Our Galaxy
