The earliest detection of dark matter was around 12 billion years ago.
A collaboration led by researchers from Japan's Nagoya University has found that dark matter in the early universe is less clumpy than previously thought. It's possible that the fundamental rules of the universe could have been different when the universe was just 1.7 billion years old.
The key to mapping dark matter in the very early universe is the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Dark matter is around distant galaxies. The idea was crazy. The University of Tokyo professor said that no one realized they could do it. Hironao came to me after I gave a talk and said it may be possible to look at dark matter around these galaxies.
Scientists are looking to reveal the earliest galaxies with the full operations of the james wbb space telescope.
Astronomers see other galaxies as they were when the observed light left them. We can see the most distant galaxies in the infant universe because they were billions of years ago.
Dark matter is difficult to observe. Around 85% of the universe is made of dark matter. It doesn't have the same interaction with matter and light as the everyday matter of protons and neutrons.
Calculating dark matter's interaction with gravity is the only way to see it.
The curvature of space-time is caused by objects of mass. A stretchy rubber sheet is holding balls. The bigger the mass, the bigger the dent it causes. The warping of space-time caused by the bigger object is more extreme.
Massive objects cause space-time to curve so strongly that light from sources behind a galaxy is curved like a marble rolling across a stretched rubber sheet. The light source in the sky is shifted by this effect.
Analyzing the distribution of dark matter in a galaxy can be done by observing how light from a source behind it is changed. The greater the distortion of the light passing it, the darker the lens galaxy is.
The technique doesn't have all the answers.
Astronomers need a lot of background sources and a lot of early galaxies to spot lensing by dark matter because the earliest and most distant galaxies are very faint. The distribution of dark matter in the universe is limited by this issue.
The light source is more ancient than any other. When the universe cooled enough to allow atoms to form, the amount of photon-scattering free electrons was reduced. The reduction in free electrons made the universe transparent to light.
Light from other distant sources can be distorted by dark matter.
University of Tokyo assistant professor Yuichi Harikane said that most researchers use source galaxies to measure dark matter distribution. We were able to look back into the past because we used the more distant CMB.
Dark matter dating back to when the universe was just 1.7 billion years old was detected by combining lensing distortions of ancient galaxies with those of the CMB. There is a very different picture of the universe painted by this ancient dark matter.
Dark matter was measured for the first time from the earliest moments of the universe. Things were very different a billion years ago. There are more galaxies that are in the process of forming than there are at the moment.
There are between 100 and 1000 galaxies bound to large amounts of dark matter.
There is a chance that dark matter is less clumpy in the early universe than models suggest.
The widely accepted Lambda-CDM model suggests that small fluctuations in the CMB should have caused gravity to create dense pockets of matter. The fluctuations eventually lead to the collapse of matter to form stars and planets.
Harikane said that their finding is still unclear. It would suggest that the model is flawed if it is true. The model that may provide insight into the nature of dark matter could be improved if the result holds after the uncertainties are reduced.
If the assumptions behind the model need to be revised, the team will continue to collect data.
The data used by the team came from a telescope in Hawaii. A better dark matter distribution map could be available as a result of the researchers only using a third of the data.
Data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time could allow researchers to look at dark matter further back in time.
Harikane said that LSST would allow them to see half the sky. The dark matter distribution is 13 billion years old.
The research was published in the journal.
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