Astronomers map Dark Matter out to 1 billion light years

Using gravitational lensing as predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, astronomers have produced a Dark Matter map of our universe out to 1 billion light years:

The observations show that dark matter in the Universe is distributed as a network of gigantic dense (white) and empty (dark) regions

These observations are the largest scale map of Dark Matter every produced.

This is the first direct glimpse at dark matter on large scales showing the cosmic web in all directions.

It looks like Dark Matter is everywhere and closely associated with visible matter, i.e. galaxies:

The densest regions of the dark matter cosmic web host massive clusters of galaxies.

www.physorg.com...

Very cool, hopefully it will end up telling us a lot more about dark matter

Nice post.

I'm not smart enough to get the pictures..could be anything as far as im concerned haha..

but yea, dark matter, basically everything inbetweem "everything".

reply to post by dannotz


The white blobs in the first picture is where they say the dark matter is. And there is a large amount of it. It not only surrounds galaxies but groups of galaxies (clusters).

Good topic -Thanks for the info.
I do not think space is the vacuem I was taught to believe it is
We only see a small portion of the whole picture as your pics show.
Technology allows us to glimpse things our senses can not
So much more to understand than we presently know

reply to post by Nicolas Flamel


Thanks


And yea, isn't most of the Universe made up of the stuff?

Something like 98% of the Universe is dark matter, right?

reply to post by dannotz


According to NASA:

It turns out that roughly 70% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe.

science.nasa.gov...

I don't think we even know how to detect dark energy yet, but we see the effects of it since galaxies are speeding up after the big bang. They should be slowing down because of the effects of gravity if there was no dark energy.

Space seems not to be as empty as we thought. Until only recently scientists thought space was not empty but an "ether" in which things happened. Given the fact of dark matter and energy, particles popping into and out of existence, space being curved around objects like stars and planets, space seems to be more than just a vacuum.

reply to post by Nicolas Flamel

Do you think perhaps that somehow the visible cosmos of galaxies is somehow fueled by dark energy or matter thus causing the galaxies to speed up as you state???

Originally posted by artistpoet
reply to post by Nicolas Flamel

 

Do you think perhaps that somehow the visible cosmos of galaxies is somehow fueled by dark energy or matter thus causing the galaxies to speed up as you state???

They are still trying to figure it out, but dark energy seems to have the opposite effect of gravity in that it pushes things apart rather than attracting them together.

Physicists refer to it as follows:

Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously,[3] and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space

If anyone knows what this means, let us know.

en.wikipedia.org...

Like dark matter, I think we will eventually know what these "dark" things are and give them proper names.