• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Cosmic Web’s Dark Matter Strands Revealed For The First Time

February 14, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Dark matter has been shown to be concentrated in threads within a spectacular cluster of galaxies popular with amateur astronomers. These filaments explain why the galaxies occupy their locations. The finding shows that, while our models of the universe are facing challenges, they continue to predict many things rather well.

Galaxies are not randomly distributed through space, instead huddling in smallish groups, like the one our own Milky Way is part of, and much larger clusters. These also follow patterns, and according to the concordance cosmological model, they occur where vast filaments that form the cosmic web meet. 

Advertisement

Tests of this theory have found evidence to support it when it comes to the ordinary baryonic matter that makes up stars. However, the model predicts these filaments will mostly be made up of dark matter, whose presence is much harder to confirm. After all, we can’t see dark matter – it’s in the name – and don’t even know what it is. Mapping its distribution poses obvious challenges.

These are not insurmountable, however, as a team at South Korea’s Yonsei University claims to have overcome them to the extent of showing these cosmic web filaments also have a dark matter component. Rather than inferring the presence of dark matter from the distribution of sources of light, the team looked for distortions in the light from more distant objects, indicating distortions in spacetime. 

Such bending of the fabric of the universe can only be done, as far as we know, by immense gravitational forces. We can see this happening from massive objects that we can see, and the gravity from dark matter should do the same.

The Yonsei team turned the Subaru Telescope on the Coma cluster, which despite being 320 million light years away, is so luminous its brightest galaxies draw backyard telescopes to observe the Coma Berenices constellation. They found the cluster is affecting light from more distant sources far more than the galaxies within it – even including their associated dark matter – could account for.

Advertisement

Some concentration of mass lies between the galaxies, and if the models are right, it should lie along so-called intracluster filaments (ICFs). A statement from the Subaru Telescope describes the ICFs as the “terminal ends of dark matter filaments” that stretch across millions of light years.

There’s also a history to the choice of the Coma Cluster. In 1933, Fritz Zwicky reported the speed with which the galaxies in the Coma Cluster were moving was so great, that it would take a staggering amount of mass to hold them together. More mass, Zwicky showed, than the visible component of these galaxies would provide, indicating there must be something more, which was eventually named dark matter. Although dark matter’s existence had been proposed before, and was not generally accepted until decades later based on galactic rotation rates, Zwicky is now considered a pioneer on this topic.

The authors mapped the distribution of mass within the cluster by where the distortions in more distant light are most extreme, a process known as “weak lensing”. They compared the locations of peaks in the mass with predictions of where these filaments should lie. 

What the authors call the northern ICF matched expectations well, although the paper announcing the result notes the western one is “at the low end of the distribution.”

Advertisement

The ICFs are also much more densely packed with mass than their surrounds – 67 and 33 times the background density, respectively – the authors report. Together, the findings indicate that a substantial fraction of the Coma Cluster’s mass is contained in ICFs running through it. 

Besides providing further evidence for the existence of dark matter, something accepted by the vast majority of astronomers, the work indicates our understanding of its distribution is on the right track.

On the other hand, since these ICFs are not visible when we merely count galaxies and measure their brightness, the authors suggest cluster masses are probably being underestimated.

The study is published in Nature Astronomy.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Jorge Sampaio, who showed teeth in Portuguese presidential powers, dies at 81
  2. U.S. special envoy to Haiti quits over ‘inhumane’ migrant deportations
  3. Elevate launches its approach to managing pre-tax benefits with $12M Series A
  4. Formula Calculate Any Digit Of Pi, Nobody Noticed For Centuries

Source Link: Cosmic Web's Dark Matter Strands Revealed For The First Time

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version