Jan 7 2007
From The Space Library
NASA announced that an international team of astronomers had used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to create the first three-dimensional map of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, an undertaking fundamental to understanding how galaxies have grown and clustered over billions of years. The research team had focused HST’s camera on an area of the sky 2° wide during 600 HST orbits, the largest investment of viewing time for a single project since the telescope had launched in 1990. Astronomers had measured the shapes of half a million faraway galaxies, constructing a map of dark matter that “stretches halfway back to the beginning of the universe and shows how dark matter has grown increasingly ‘clumpy’ as it collapses under gravity.” The map provided the best evidence to date that normal matter, such as that composing galaxies, collects along the densest concentration of dark matter, thereby revealing a loose network of filaments that intersect in massive structures at the locations of clusters of galaxies. One of the researchers, Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology, described the dark matter as “scaffolding,” stating that the stars and galaxies had assembled themselves inside of the scaffolding.
NASA, “Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web of ‘Clumpy’ Dark Matter in 3-D,” news release 07-02, 7 January 2007, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/jan/HQ_07002_Hubble_Dark_Matter.html (accessed 7 January 2007); Richard Massey et al., “Dark Matter Maps Reveal Cosmic Scaffolding,” Nature 445 (18 January 2007): 286–290, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7125/full/nature05497.html (DOI 10.1038/nature05497; accessed 4 March 2010); John Johnson Jr., “Dark Matter Is Mapped Unseen,” Los Angeles Times, 8 January 2007.
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