• 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

New Map Of “Hydrogen Forest” Supports The Existence Of Dark Matter

July 31, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

A team of astrophysicists have mapped the “Lyman-Alpha Forest”, and provided further supporting evidence that galaxy and galaxy cluster formations are better explained by dark matter than alternative theories.

Advertisement

While observing the universe, astronomers found that galaxies and galaxy clusters don’t behave in the way we would expect. In short, stars at the edge of galaxies move so fast (in most, but not all galaxies) that they should be yeeted off into intergalactic space given the amount of visible mass we can see in those galaxies.

There are alternative explanations, such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) where it is proposed that gravity works differently at low accelerations. There are problems with MOND, and the currently favored hypothesis by most physicists is that space is filled with invisible “dark matter” which only interacts with other baryonic matter (the stuff which we can see) via gravity.

To explain the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters, dark matter is expected to have about 10 times as much mass as ordinary baryonic matter, but so far we haven’t found any direct evidence of what it is. Candidates still range from weakly interactive massive particles (WIMPS) and axions to primordial black holes, though this latter candidate is also beginning to look unlikely. It has been suggested too that it could be caused by supermassive black holes behaving in ways we haven’t got our comparatively very puny heads around yet.

In the new study, astrophysicists from the University of California, Riverside, used the “Lyman-Alpha Forest” to attempt to indirectly map dark matter. Essentially, they looked at light from distant sources and mapped drops in light along the hydrogen wavelength. These drops in light correspond to matter the light has encountered along the way.

Advertisement

“It’s somewhat like shadow puppetry, where we guess the character placed between the light and the screen based on its silhouette,” Simeon Bird, associate professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study, said in a statement. 

“Since each type of atom has a specific way of absorbing light, leaving a sort of signature in the spectrogram, it is possible to trace their presence, especially that of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe,” Bird explained.



The result of mapping this light is the “forest”, resembling many small trees. The team says that using hydrogen spectrograms can be used to trace dark matter indirectly, like pouring dye into a stream of water.

Advertisement

“The dye will follow where the water goes,” Bird said. “Dark matter gravitates so it has a gravitational potential. The hydrogen gas falls into it, and you use it as a tracer of the dark matter. Where it is denser there’s more dark matter. You can think of the hydrogen as the dye and the dark matter as the water.”



The team suggests that the structures seen in the resulting map are indicative of an unknown influence, or that dark matter is a particle. This is, of course, not “mystery solved” as we have never detected such a particle.

“It’s not completely convincing yet,” Bird added. “But if this holds up in later data sets, then it is much more likely to be a new particle or some new type of physics, rather than the black holes messing up our calculations.”

Advertisement

The study is published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers
  2. Quantum computer software startup QC Ware raises $25 million
  3. Thousands Of Ancient Maya Structures Revealed By Jungle-Penetrating Lasers
  4. Amber Road: The Other Great Trade Route Of The Ancient World

Source Link: New Map Of "Hydrogen Forest" Supports The Existence Of Dark Matter

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “Dead Men’s Fingers” Might Just Be The Strangest Fruit On The Planet
  • The South Atlantic’s Giant Weak Spot In The Earth’s Magnetic Field Is Growing
  • Nearly Half A Century After Being Lost, “Zombie Satellite” LES-1 Began Sending Signals To Earth
  • Extinct In the Wild, An Incredibly Rare Spix’s Macaw Chick Hatches In New Hope For Species
  • HUNTR/X Or Giant Squid? Following Alien Claims, We Asked Scientists What They Would Like Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS To Be
  • Flat-Earthers Proved Wrong Using A Security Camera And A Garage
  • Earth Breaches Its First Climate Tipping Point: We’re Moving Into A World Without Coral Reefs
  • Cheese Caves, A Proposal, And Chance: How Scientists Ended Up Watching Fungi Evolve In Real Time
  • Lab-Grown 3D Embryo Models Make Their Own Blood In Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough
  • Humans’ Hidden “Sixth Sense” To Be Mapped Following $14.2 Million Prize – What Is Interoception?
  • Purple Earth Hypothesis: Our Planet Was Not Blue And Green Over 2.4 Billion Years Ago
  • Hippos Hung Around In Europe 80,000 Years Later Than We Thought
  • Officially Gone: Slender-Billed Curlew, Once-Widespread Migratory Bird, Declared Extinct By IUCN
  • Watch: Rare Footage Captures Freaky Faceless Cusk Eels Lurking On The Deep-Sea Floor
  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • 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