Dark Matter (Photo : Reuters)
Dark energy maps were released to show the dark matter concentration in the cosmos, Penn News reported. The maps are the biggest contiguous mapping project created with the highest amount of details to improve the scientists' understanding of the role of dark matter in the galaxy.
Vinu Vikram, the lead researcher from Argonne National Laboratory, conducted the work while fulfilling a postdoctoral position at Pennsylvania University with the help of Chihway Chang from Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
The map, which shows voids and clumps of dark matter in patches of sky coverings surrounding two million galaxies, was presented Chang on April 13 during a meeting with the American Physical Society held at Baltimore, Maryland. The researchers have described their analysis in the upcoming "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society" issue.
Showing the galaxies' features, the results implied that dark matter is more abundant, approximately five times more, than those that can be seen by the human eye. Though most are invisible, its existence could be determined because of the curves in the space-time.
Abundance of dark matter in the foreground could actually bend the light that comes from the background galaxies, modifying its images, Nature wrote. The effect, dubbed as "weak gravitational lensing," has also been studied towards a full understanding of the dark matter in each one of the galaxies.
The analysis, which was affected by the weak gravitational lensing that resulted to dark matter's bending of light, presented subtle distortions in the shapes of maps of two million galaxies.
