An outside team of astronomer has keep an eye on the light from 15 million galaxies in an effort to uncover the property of dark matter , one of the biggest mysteries of the universe .
Using the European Southern Observatory ’s ( ESO ) Very Large Telescope ( VLT ) , the researchers scanned about 450 square degrees of the sky ( slimly over 1 pct ) to make the most accurate mensuration of cosmic shear , tiny optical aberration in the light of galaxies due to the sobriety of dark subject .
The observations are part of theKilo Degree Survey ( KiDS)and they come out to argue that dark subject does n’t cluster up but remains smooth , stretching from coltsfoot to galaxy across the cosmos in what ’s known as the cosmic web . The results are published in theMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
“ This late result indicates that disconsolate subject in the cosmic web , which accounts for about one - one-quarter of the content of the Universe , is less clumpy than we previously believed , ” conscientious objector - author Massimo Viola of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands said in astatement .
The consequence will serve rectify how dark matter is modeled . Dark issue is “ dark ” because it does n’t interact with light , only with gravity . And even the gravitational fundamental interaction is not that strong . You ca n’t have a dark matter satellite , and the KiDS answer indicates that dark issue is even smoother than previously thought .
This smoothness is actually low than what was estimated from the reflection by theEuropean Space Agency’sPlanck artificial satellite . The new result is a substantial discrepancy , but it is definitely not a fatal blow for dark matter . Dark matter is still the good explanation for what we see in the universe , although we might not have peg down all its properties yet .
“ We see an intriguing discrepancy with Planck cosmology at the moment , " bestow Konrad Kuijken , the principal investigator of the KiDS view . " next missions such as the Euclid satellite and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will admit us to repeat these measurement and well understand what the Universe is really telling us . "
Measuring cosmic shear wo n’t be pass on to just notice though , as already supercomputers and researchers arepreparing softwareto discover what dark topic really is .
