Researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to re-calculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there’s about six times as much dark matter in the universe as there is regular matter, a finding consistent with previous measurements.
But the team also found that the matter was less clumped together than previously thought, a finding detailed in a setofthree papers, all published this week in Physical Review D.
The Dark Energy Survey observes photons of light at visible wavelengths; the South Pole Telescope looks at light at microwave wavelengths. That means the South Pole Telescope observes the cosmic microwave background—the oldest radiation we can see, which dates back to about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
The team presented the datasets from the respective surveys in two maps of the sky; they then overlaid the two maps to understand the full picture of how matter is distributed in the universe.
“It seems like there are slightly less fluctuations in the current universe than we would predict, assuming our standard cosmological model anchored to the early universe,” said Eric Baxter, an astronomer at the University of Hawai’i and a co-author of the research, in a university release. “The high precision and robustness to sources of bias of the new results present a particularly compelling case that we may be starting to uncover holes in our standard cosmological model.”
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Dark matter is something in the universe that we cannot observe directly. We know it’s there because of its gravitational effects, but otherwise we can’t see it. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, according to CERN. (Ordinary matter is about 5% of the universe’s total content.) The remaining 68% is made up of dark energy, a hitherto uncertain category that is evenly distributed throughout the universe and responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.
The Dark Energy Survey still has three years of data to be analyzed, and a new look at the cosmic microwave background is currently being undertaken by the South Pole Telescope. Meanwhile, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (high in the Chilean desert of the same name) is currently taking a high-sensitivity survey of the background. With newly precise data to probe, researchers may be able to put the standard cosmological model to a difficult test.
In 2021, the Atacama telescope helped scientists come up with a newly precise measurement for the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years. More querying of the cosmic microwave background could also help researchers deal with the Hubble tension, a disagreement between two of the best ways for measuring the expansion of the universe. (Depending on how it’s measured, researchers land on two different figures for the rate of that expansion.)
As means of observation get more precise, and more data is collected and analyzed, that information can be fed back into grand cosmological models to determine where we’ve been wrong in the past and lead us to new lines of investigation.
More: Antimatter Could Travel Through Our Galaxy With Ease, Physicists Say
Scientists are abuzz with anticipation for the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the biggest and most powerful infrared space-based telescope, which will be revealed in July.
“[The images] are sure to deliver a long-awaited ‘wow’ for astronomers and the public,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in the US.
It took more than two decades to develop the James Webb Space Telescope, at a cost of about $10 billion (€9.48 billion), and it’s hoped that these first images will go some way to justify all the work, time and money.
A joint project between NASA, the American space agency, and the European and Canadian space agencies, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021.
It uses infrared to allow scientists to see deep into space. They want to see distant galaxies and stars and understand how they have formed.
They also hope the telescope will allow them to learn more about exoplanets — planets that orbit stars than our own sun — and to look for signs of life.
What is infrared?
As with visible light, the kind we can see with our eyes, infrared is a form of electromagnetic radiation.
Electromagnetic radiation comes in different wavelengths that lie on a spectrum, which starts with radio at one end and includes microwave, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma ray.
Infrared is itself a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum and is divided into near-infrared, mid-infrared and far-infrared.
If you’ve seen movies like “Predator,” the documentary series “Planet Earth” or the performance by Thirty Seconds to Marsat the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, you’ll be familiar with infrared light and some of its uses.
All of the above examples used thermal cameras, which capture infrared light.
Thermal cameras are also used at airports to measure peoples’ body temperature, which increases when you get a fever, for example from an infection with SARS-CoV-2.
Some snakes like vipers, pythons and boas have special “pit” organs that can detect infrared radiation — or body heat — from their prey as well.
How do infrared thermal cameras work?
Anything that is above absolute zero (-273.15 degrees Celsius / -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), whether living or inanimate, emits infrared radiation — that includes you and the chair you’re sitting on.
Even if we can’t see the object with our eyes, it will emit heat radiation. We can detect that radiation with infrared and then convert that data into an image, using different colors to illustrate the intensity of the infrared radiation. And that creates a contour with detailed outlines of the object.
The James Webb Space Telescope will deliver the sharpest images of deep space to date
That’s similar to how infrared telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope create images from space.
Why use infrared on the James Webb Space Telescope?
Astronomers need infrared to be able to see the earliest stars and galaxies.
Infrared allows us to see through dust clouds that would otherwise block our view.
Dust clouds are where stars and planets are born, and being able to see through them will help us better understand how those stars and planets form.
The James Webb Space Telescope has a massive mirror to capture light from distant stars and planets.
The mirror is six times larger than the one used on its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope should be able to see objects that are 10 to 100 times fainter than what Hubble could see, and take much sharper and detailed images in infrared than any previous telescope of its kind.
A new era in infrared
Infrared was discovered in 1800 by German-born British astronomer William Herschel, one of the main astronomers behind the discovery of Uranus.
Herschel used a prism and a thermometer to measure how different colors of light influenced temperature and noticed the biggest increase in temperature was in a region that became known as infrared.
The James Webb Space Telescope launched in December from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana
There have been many more discoveries and technological improvements since then, including the first detection of infrared radiation from the moon on 1856.
In 1878 came the invention of the bolometer, an infrared measuring device, that was used in an updated form on the Herschel Space Observatory until 2013.
Infrared detectors continue to improve in sensitivity and accuracy, allowing scientists to detect infrared light from planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
The James Webb Space Telescope will now add to this rich history by looking further back in time than ever before, and with unprecedented detail.
If we’re lucky, it will reveal what the universe looked like just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Computer glitch solved
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope wasn’t able to send images between June 13 and July 15, 2021. A faulty computer memory system halted the telescope’s operations. Only retired NASA experts managed to get it working again. For more than three decades, Hubble has provided fascinating images of distant stars and galaxies.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Stars are born
This is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the Hubble Space Telescope has observed during its lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbor, NGC 2020, which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This satellite galaxy of the Milky Way is approximately 163,000 light-years away.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Better than ‘Star Wars’
Just as a new episode of “Star Wars” hit cinemas in 2015, Hubble took this picture of a cosmic lightsaber. The celestial structure is located about 1,300 light-years away. It’s the birth of a star system — two cosmic jets beaming outward from a newborn star and some interstellar dust. The space telescope takes breathtaking pictures. Here are some more …
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Eyes in space
Since 1990, the king of all space telescopes has been orbiting Earth at a speed of over 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour) and an altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers). Hubble is 11 meters (36 feet) long and weighs 11 metric tons (12.2 US tons), making it comparable in weight and size to a school bus.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Scoping out cosmic bubbles
Hubble has helped us understand the birth of stars and planets, approximate the age of the universe and examine the nature of dark matter. Here we see a gigantic ball of gas created by a supernova explosion.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Fleeting colors
Different gases emit all kinds of different colors. Red, for instance, is a sign of sulfur. Green is hydrogen. And blue is oxygen.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Hubble needs glasses
The first pictures Hubble sent back were a catastrophe, however, because its main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. In 1993, Space Shuttle Endeavor took experts to Hubble to fix the problem, giving it a pair of glasses. That was just one of five updates the telescope has received over the years, the last one coming in 2009.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Space kindergarten
Hubble took this amazing picture in December 2009. The blue dots are very young stars, just a few million years old. This kindergarten of stars is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, and a satellite of our Milky Way.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Butterfly?
How about this snapshot from space? Nobody really knows what exactly Hubble had in its lens here, but that doesn’t mean the shot is any less stunning. This image is just one of over 30,000 that Hubble has captured for the ages.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Divine sombrero
This virtually transcendent photograph is — like most Hubble images — a composition of many single shots. The Sombrero Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation and is located a mere 28 million light-years from the Earth.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Hubble in the flesh
The telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). He was the first person to observe that the universe is expanding. With this finding, he paved the way for our current cosmological understanding of the Big Bang as initiator of the universe.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Pillars of Creation
These column-shaped structures are found in the Eagle Nebula, around 7,000 light-years away from Earth. They were documented by Hubble and have received worldwide recognition under the name “Pillars of Creation.”
A look back at Hubble’s best images
In the starting blocks
Hubble is going strong, again. Due to its constantly sinking orbit, however, the telescope may reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in 2024 and burn up. But its successor is already set: James Webb, being tested inside a thermal vacuum chamber here, is scheduled to be launched this year. Its workplace will be about 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) from Earth.
A look back at Hubble’s best images
Space smiley
This, by the way, is another one of Hubble’s creations — a space smiley! The easy explanation? It was made by bending light.
Artist’s impression of an ancient galaxy. Image: University of Copenhagen/NASA
The presence of two previously undetected galaxies some 29 billion light years away suggests our understanding of the early universe is upsettingly deficient.
Introducing REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2—two galaxies that, until very recently, we didn’t even know existed. The light from these galaxies took 13 billion years to get here, as these objects formed shortly after the Big Bang. The ongoing expansion of the universe places these ancient galaxies at roughly 29 billion light years from Earth.
New research published in Nature suggests REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2 had escaped detection up until this point because our view of these galaxies is clouded by thick layers of cosmic dust. The Hubble Space Telescope, as mighty as it is, could not peer through the celestial haze. It took the ultra-sensitive ALMA radio telescope in Chile to spot the galaxies, in what turned out to be a fortuitous accident.
“We were looking at a sample of very distant galaxies, which we already knew existed from the Hubble Space Telescope. And then we noticed that two of them had a neighbor that we didn’t expect to be there at all,” Pascal Oesch, an astronomer from the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, explained in a statement. “As both of these neighboring galaxies are surrounded by dust, some of their light is blocked, making them invisible to Hubble.”
Oesch is an expert at finding some of universe’s farthest galaxies. Back in 2016, he and his colleagues detected the 13.4 billion-year-old GN-z11 galaxy, setting a cosmic distance record. GN-z11 formed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang.
The ALMA radio telescope made the discovery possible. Image: University of Copenhagen/NASA
The new paper describes how ALMA and the new observing technique developed by Oesch and his colleagues might be able to spot similarly obscured ancient galaxies. And there’s apparently many more awaiting discovery. The astronomers compared the two newly detected galaxies to previously known galactic sources in the early universe, leading them to suspect that “up to one in five of the earliest galaxies may have been missing from our map of the heavens,” Oesch said.
To which he added: “Before we can start to understand when and how galaxies formed in the Universe, we first need a proper accounting.” Indeed, the new paper asserts that more ancient galaxies existed in the early universe than previously believed. This is significant because the earliest galaxies formed the building blocks of subsequent galaxies. So until we have a “proper accounting,” as Oesch put it, astronomers could be working with a deficient or otherwise inaccurate model of the early universe.
The task now will be to find these missing galaxies, and thankfully an upcoming instrument promises to make this job considerably easier: the Webb Space Telescope. This next-gen observatory, said Oesch, “will be much more sensitive than Hubble and able to investigate longer wavelengths, which ought to allow us to see these hidden galaxies with ease.”
The new paper is thus testable, as observations made by Webb are likely to confirm, negate, or further refine the predictions made by the researchers. The space telescope is scheduled to launch from French Guiana on Wednesday December 22 7:20 a.m. ET (4:30 a.m. PT).
More: Webb Telescope Not Damaged Following Mounting Incident, NASA Says.
