Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | University of California, Berkeley | 2018 Apr 10
Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley researchers map the network of filaments connecting the universe's visible matter
Scientists have decoded faint distortions in the patterns of the universe’s earliest light to map huge tubelike structures invisible to our eyes – known as filaments – that serve as superhighways for delivering matter to dense hubs such as galaxy clusters.
The international science team, which included researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, analyzed data from past sky surveys using sophisticated image-recognition technology to home in on the gravity-based effects that identify the shapes of these filaments. They also used models and theories about the filaments to help guide and interpret their analysis.
Published April 9 in the journal Nature Astronomy, the detailed exploration of filaments will help researchers to better understand the formation and evolution of the cosmic web – the large-scale structure of matter in the universe – including the mysterious, unseen stuff known as dark matter that makes up about 85 percent of the total mass of the universe.
Dark matter constitutes the filaments – which researchers learned typically stretch and bend across hundreds of millions of light years – and the so-called halos that host clusters of galaxies are fed by the universal network of filaments. More studies of these filaments could provide new insights about dark energy, another mystery of the universe that drives its accelerating expansion. ...
The detection of the imprint of filaments on cosmic microwave background lensing - Siyu He et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 09 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0426-z
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1709.02543 > 08 Sep 2017