The distribution of matter throughout the universe during the course of the universe’s history has been followed by an international team of researchers. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the first light to shine freely in the universe, was employed in this study to examine the cosmos’ invisible stuff and verify that observations support our hypotheses.
Currently, depending on how you look at it, our knowledge of the universe is either quite restricted or appallingly so. The Standard Model of Cosmology is a theory that has done a great job of explaining what we see. Dark matter and dark energy, however, are two essential components of it, and we have absolutely no understanding of what they are. A false concept is a dark matter. Since it solely interacts with gravity and not light, it is not dark but rather invisible.
Because galaxy clusters are large formations that are packed with dark matter, the team used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the high Chilean Andes to monitor small changes to the CMB due to these structures. The modifications offer a map of the distribution of both visible and unseen stuff in the cosmos.
According to Mathew Madhavacheril of the University of Pennsylvania, the main author of one of the studies, “We’ve made a new mass map using distortions of light left over from the Big Bang.” Surprisingly, it offers measurements that demonstrate that the ‘lumpiness’ of the universe and the rate at which it is expanding after 14 billion years of evolution are exactly what you’d anticipate from our traditional cosmology model based on Einstein’s theory of gravity.
We should be quite thrilled about this. Despite its limitations, our model still has a lot of explanatory power. But there is a problem on the horizon: the so-called Cosmological Crisis. The results of several methods for calculating the universe’s expansion rate vary. The lumpiness could indicate that dark matter was not as lumpy as predicted. However, the lumps on this map are the perfect size.
Frank Qu, a Cambridge Ph.D. candidate and the lead author of one of the new articles, said of the findings, “When I first saw them, our measurements were in such good agreement with the underlying theory that it took me a moment to process the results.” It will be intriguing to watch how this potential disagreement between various measurements will be addressed, but we still don’t know what dark matter is.
