Dark matter’s tendrils revealed for the first time..Nature

[Ichingcarpenter]

Source: Nature

Direct measurement of a dark-matter ‘filament’ confirms its existence in a galaxy supercluster.



A ‘finger’ of the Universe’s dark-matter skeleton, which ultimately dictates where galaxies form, has been observed for the first time. Researchers have directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.

The presence of dark matter is usually inferred by the way its strong gravity bends light travelling from distant galaxies that lie behind it — distorting their apparent shapes as seen by telescopes on Earth. But it is difficult to observe this 'gravitational lensing' by dark matter in filaments because they contain relatively little mass.

Dietrich and his colleagues got around this problem by studying a particularly massive filament, 18 megaparsecs long, that bridges the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. Luckily, this dark bridge is oriented so that most of its mass lies along the line of sight to Earth, enhancing the lensing effect, explains Dietrich. The team examined the distortion of more than 40,000 background galaxies, and calculated that the mass in the filament is between 6.5 × 1013 and 9.8 × 1013 times the mass of the Sun. Their results are reported in Nature today1.


Read more: http://www.nature.com/news/dark-matter-s-tendrils-revealed-1.10951

[longship]

1. Holy Shit!

I would quibble about the percentage -- which seems to be 20-some percent dark matter and 70-some percent dark energy. But this may be important physics.

If they break something in physics, that's good. It means new stuff, always a good thing.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. That's 6.5 × 10[sup]13[/sup] and 9.8 × 10[sup]13[/sup], for those who were wondering ...

6.5 × 10¹³ and 9.8 × 10¹³ -- sup and sub are not buttons in DU3, unfortunately.