Dark Matter Proved To Be More Smoother Than Previously Known

There has been an analysis of a huge new galaxy survey created with ESO's VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, which suggests that dark matter is less dense and a lot smoothly distributed throughout the space than what was preciously thought.

A global team used information from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) to check how the light from 15 million distant galaxies was greatly affected by the gravitational influence of matter on the biggest scales within the universe. The results seem to be not aggreeing with earlier results from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.

Mr. Hendrik Hildebrandt from the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn, Germany, and Massimo Viola from the Leiden Observatory of The Netherlands together led a team of astronomers from different institutions around the world that processed pictures from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), which was created with ESO's VLT Survey Telescope (VST) that can be found in Chile. For the sake of their analysis, they used pictures from the survey that lined five patches of the sky covering a complete space of around 2,200 times the scale of the full Moon and containing around 15 million galaxies, according to Phys.org.

In exploiting the exquisite image quality obtainable to the VST at the Paranal area, and by using innovative computer software, the team was able to do one among the most precise measurements ever fabricated from a cosmic shear effect. This is often a refined variant of weak gravitational lensing, which the light emitted from distant galaxies. It is slightly crooked by the gravitational effect of enormous amounts of matter, like galaxy clusters, according to Live Mint.

In a cosmic shear, it is not galaxy clusters, however, large-scale structures within the universe that warp the light that produces a fairly smaller effect. A wide and deep survey, like Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), is sufficient to make sure that the very weak cosmic shear signal is robust enough to be measured and might be employed by astronomers to map the distribution of gravitating matter.

Dark matter is very well known as a mysterious substance that is not visible to telescopes and can only be recognized by its gravitational pull on other objects in the universe. Meanwhile, the results of this research were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.