Two teams of researchers have used data from Chandra and other telescopes to map dark matter in 3-D in a galaxy cluster.
This study follows up on the successful feasibility study of Neukermans et al. (2009) for mapping suspended matter in turbid waters from the SEVIRI sensor on board the METEOSAT geostationary weather satellite platform.
A B-mode polarization pattern indicates that the light has been twisted by interactions with massive objects it passed on its way to Earth, allowing astronomers to map the matter in the universe.
For example, a competition for NASA, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the European Space Agency identified new ways to map dark matter in the universe, while another competition helped better determine the likelihood that the health of a HIV patient would improve or deteriorate.
Another important difference is that Morandi and Limousin used a more detailed model for the 3-D map of dark matter in the cluster.
Now, researchers say they've found the first firm evidence of such filaments by mapping the dark matter in a small part of the sky.
By determining the degree that galaxies are being lensed from where they'd be without that gravitational pull, it's possible to make a 3-dimensional map of dark matter in the Universe.
Cosmologist Andrew Taylor of the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh, U.K., and his colleagues have used this trick, called gravitational lensing, to map the dark matter in a vast supercluster known as Abell 901.
"All the objects that you can see in the distance appear slightly distorted and warped". Using this distortion allowed Dr Massey, with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to "map" the dark matter in the clusters as they collided.
AUSTIN, TEXAS-Astronomers have made the largest map yet of dark matter in the universe.
