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Scientists have used the oldest light in the universe to capture unprecedented insight into the distribution of dark matter, an unexplained substance that accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos, around galaxies, a new study reports.
While previous observations have traced patterns of galactic dark matter back to 10 billion years ago, the new results push that frontier back to 12 billion years ago. The achievement reveals potential challenges to the standard model of cosmology, a well-tested framework that explains much of the strange phenomena that have been observed in space.
Scientists led by Hironao Miyatake, a cosmologist at Nagoya University, obtained “the first detection of the distribution of dark matter” around galaxies during this early era of the universe, which “opens a new window to constrain cosmological parameters.” “, according to a study published on Monday In the diary Physical Review Letters.
The team was able to make this breakthrough with the help of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest observable light in the universe, generated by heat left over from the Big Bang.
“Look at the dark matter around distant galaxies?” said Masami Ouchi, a cosmologist at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study, in a sentence. “It was a crazy idea. Nobody realized that we could do this. But after giving a talk on a large sample of distant galaxies, Hironao approached me and told me that it is possible to observe the dark matter around these galaxies with the CMB.”
Dark matter is one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, in part because this strange substance emits no detectable light. Scientists only know that dark matter exists because of its clear gravitational influence on “normal” visible matter, such as that which makes up stars, planets, and our bodies. If scientists could identify the nature of dark matter, it would fill a huge gap in our understanding of the cosmos that could shed light on a host of other questions, such as the fundamental composition of the universe and the evolution of galaxies like our own Milky Way.
Dark matter is not evenly distributed throughout the universe, and clumps of it often coincide with massive objects made of regular matter, such as galaxies. One way to understand how the distribution of dark matter has evolved over time, and thus how it has influenced regular matter, is to use strange natural telescopes known as gravitational lensing.
These lenses are created when massive objects, such as galaxy clusters, are located in front of objects even more distant from our perspective on Earth. The gravitational fields of these foreground objects distort the light of background objects in such a way that they can be magnified hundreds of times, allowing scientists to peer into distant corners of the universe that would otherwise be out of sight. .
These cosmic lenses have helped researchers map the distribution of dark matter for ten billion years, but Miyatake and colleagues have now pioneered a new technique that goes back even further. The team used the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey, an astronomical project based on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to detect a whopping 1.5 million lensed galaxies that existed 12 billion years ago. The researchers then combined those images with observations of the CMB captured by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
The approach revealed the subtle microwave lensing distortions that make up this ancient light, allowing Miyatake and colleagues to map key patterns of dark matter earlier than ever before in the universe. In addition to pushing these observational limits, the results suggest a slightly different value for a key cosmological measure, essentially the clumping of matter, compared to the standard model of cosmology. If this gap between observation and theory remains constant in future studies, it could present a challenge to the model that might require the advent of new physics.
“Our finding is still uncertain,” Miyatake said in the statement. “But if true, it would suggest that the whole model is flawed as you go back in time. This is exciting because if the result holds after uncertainties are reduced, it could suggest an improvement to the model that can provide insights into the nature of dark matter itself.”
“I was glad that we opened a new window to that era,” he concluded.