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 more dark matter than ordinary matter, which is consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also found the matter to be less unified than previously thought set of three articles, all published this week in Physical Review D.
The Dark Energy Research you observe photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope looks at light at microwave wavelengths. This means that the South Pole Telescope is observing the cosmic microwave background – the oldest radiation we can see is from about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented datasets from relevant surveys on two maps of the sky; they then overlaid the two maps to get a complete picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.
“It appears that the current universe has slightly fewer fluctuations than we would have predicted if we assumed our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and co-author of the study. research at a university release. “The high precision and robustness of the new results to sources of bias presents a particularly compelling case where we can begin to poke holes in our standard cosmological model.”
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It is dark matter anything in the universe that we cannot directly observe. We know it’s there because of gravitational effects, but we can’t see it otherwise. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe. According to CERN. (Ordinary matter makes up about 5% of the total composition of the universe.) The remaining 68% it consists of dark energy, a hitherto undefined category that is uniformly distributed throughout the universe and responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to analyze, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently underway 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 study of the background. With new accurate information to explore, researchers can put cosmological standard model for a tough test.
Atacama in 2021 telescope helped scientists a new precision measurement for the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. Further investigation of the cosmic microwave background could help researchers tackle the Hubble tension, a disagreement between the two best methods for measuring the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers rely on two different numbers for the rate of this expansion.)
As observations become more precise and more data is collected and analyzed, this data can be fed back into large cosmological models to determine where we went wrong in the past and guide us in new directions of inquiry.
More: Physicists say antimatter can easily pass through our galaxy
