The researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to recalculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there is about six times as much dark matter in the universe as regular matter, a finding consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also found that the matter was less clustered than previously thought, a finding detailed in a place of Three articles, all published this week in Physical Review D.
He dark energy survey observe photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope look at the light in microwaves. That means the South Pole Telescope is looking at the cosmic microwave background, the oldest radiation we can see, dating back about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented the respective survey data sets on two sky charts; They then overlaid the two maps to understand the full picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.
“It appears that there are slightly fewer fluctuations in the universe today than we would predict, assuming that our standard cosmological model is anchored to the early universe,” said Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and a co-author of the study. research at a university launching. “The high precision and robustness of the sources of bias in the new results make a particularly compelling case that we may be beginning to discover holes in our standard cosmological model.”
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dark matter is something in the universe that we cannot directly observe. We know it’s there because of its gravitational effects, but otherwise we can’t see it. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, according to CERN. (Ordinary matter is about 5% of the total content of the universe.) The remaining 68% it is made up of dark energy, a hitherto uncertain category that is evenly distributed throughout the universe and is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to analyze, and the South Pole Telescope is taking a new look at the cosmic microwave background. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high up in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently conducting a highly sensitive survey of the background. With new precise data to probe, researchers may be able to put the standard cosmological model to a difficult test.
In 2021, the Atacama telescope helped scientists devise a new accurate measurement for the age of the universe: 13.770 million years. More inquiries about the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers deal with the Hubble strain, a disagreement between two of the best ways to measure the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers come up with two different numbers for the rate of that expansion.)
As observational means become more precise and more data is collected and analysed, that information can be fed back into large cosmological models to determine where we have gone wrong in the past and lead us to new lines of inquiry.
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