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 the universe contains about six times as much dark matter as regular matter, which is consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also found that matter was less unified than previously thought, detailed in a finding set of three The papers, all published this week in Physical Review D.
The Dark Energy Survey Observe photons of light at visible wavelengths; The South Pole Telescope Sees light of microwave wavelengths. That means the South Pole Telescope observes the cosmic microwave background—the oldest radiation we can see, which is about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented datasets from the respective surveys on two maps of the sky; They then overlapped the two maps to understand the full picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.
“It appears that the current universe has a little less fluctuation than we predicted, anchored to the early universe in our standard cosmological model,” said co-author Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. research, in a university release. “The high precision and robustness of the sources of bias in the new results present a particularly compelling case that we can begin to uncover holes in our standard cosmological model.”
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The dark matter is something in the universe that we cannot directly observe. We know it’s there because of its gravitational influence, 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 composed of dark energy, a hitherto uncertain class that is uniformly distributed throughout the universe and is responsible for the universe’s accelerated expansion.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to analyze, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently being conducted by the South Pole Telescope. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently conducting a high-sensitivity survey of the background. With new specifics for investigation, Researchers may be able to provide Ideal universe A solid test model.
In 2021, the Atacama Telescopes have helped scientists A New precise measurements For the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. Finding out more about the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers address the Hubble tension, a disagreement between the two best ways to measure the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers land on two different figures for that expansion rate.)
As the means of observation become more precise and more data is collected and analyzed, that data can be fed back into grand cosmological models to show where we went wrong in the past and lead us to new lines of inquiry.
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