Science:
Representing five years of work in imaging 10 million galaxies
at distances of about 6 billion light-years, the new
dark-matter map is 100 times larger than the largest one to
date, writes Govert Schilling for
Science. Although dark matter, which represents 98% of
the mass of the universe, cannot be seen directly, it exerts a
gravitational pull on normal matter, including light. By
measuring that pull on starlight, astronomers were able to map
its distribution. The new map shows that dark matter is
concentrated in huge clumps and filaments, with large empty
regions in between. Astrophysicist Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and
colleagues presented their results at the
219th meeting of
the American Astronomical Society. Scientists hope that by
plotting the distribution of dark matter throughout space, they
will come closer to understanding what it is.
