The universe's dark matter bent light created only 380,000 years after the
Big Bang in the manner Einstein foresaw.
Using the very first light from the cosmos, astronomers have created the
most accurate map ever of enigmatic dark matter, and the "groundbreaking"
image may yet again demonstrate Einstein's correctness.
The new image depicts the huge matter tendrils that emerged just after the
cosmos blasted into existence. It was created using light that is 14 billion
years old from the chaotic Big Bang's aftermath. It turns out that these
tendrils' forms astonishingly match those that Einstein's general theory of
relativity anticipated.
The latest finding goes against earlier dark matter maps that suggested the
cosmic web, the vast system of interconnecting celestial superhighways
filled with hydrogen gas and dark matter that spans the cosmos, is less
clumpy than Einstein's theory anticipated. The scientists presented their
findings April 11 at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Japan's
Future Science with CMB x LSS conference.
According to a statement
issued by University of Pennsylvania cosmologist
Mathew Madhavacheril, "We have created a new mass map utilizing aberrations of light left over
from the Big Bang" . Surprisingly, it offers data 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
accepted cosmological model based on Einstein's theory of gravity.
Antimatter particles, which are similar to matter particles but have the
opposite electrical charges, are thought to have been abundant in the cosmos
that emerged from the Big Bang.
If matter and antimatter were created equally, they would have destroyed
all of the universe's matter as they destroy one another when they collide.
Pockets of the initial plasma of the cosmos were, however, preserved by the
rapidly expanding fabric of space-time and a few helping quantum
disturbances.
Gravity then squeezed and heated these plasma pockets in accordance with
Einstein's theory of relativity, causing sound waves known as baryon
acoustic oscillations to ripple outward from the clumps at half the speed of
light. The baby cosmic web was formed as these enormous waves pushed out
matter that hadn't already been drawn in on themselves. It was made up of a
network of thin films that surrounded innumerable cosmic holes, much like a
nest of soap bubbles in a sink.
When this stuff cooled, it formed the earliest stars, which gathered into
matter-rich galaxies at the spots where the tangled threads of the web
met.
Yet, astronomers who studied the cosmic web in the past discovered what
appeared to be a huge disparity – the matter was noticeably more uniformly
dispersed and less lumpy than predicted. The fact that key components were
absent from existing cosmological models was a concerning indicator.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) of the U.S. National Science
Foundation (NSF) in Chile, which scanned a fourth of the whole night sky
from 2007 to 2022, was used by the researchers to investigate this apparent
disparity. The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), which was
produced barely 380,000 years after the Big Bang, was detected by the
telescope's highly sensitive microwave detector. The CMB's matter
concentrations were then mapped via gravitational lensing.
In a process known as gravitational lensing, light that is traveling
through a region of space-time that has been bent by strong gravitational
fields bends, warps, and twists until it forms an Einstein ring, which is an
extended arc. Dark matter, which makes up 85% of the universe's stuff but
cannot be directly viewed, can be found by gravitational lensing.
The new map refuted earlier ones created using visible light from galaxies
and demonstrated how much more accurate Einstein's original idea was than
previously believed.
It is still too early to say what this means for our overall understanding
of the early universe, but the researchers speculate that future maps
created using ACT data and new observations from the Simons Observatory, a
telescope being built in the Atacama Desert that can scan the sky 10 times
as quickly as ACT, may help to solve the baffling cosmic puzzle.
