Astronomers detect breakthrough cosmic dark matter filament
For the first time, astronomers have found direct evidence that the Universe is filled with a giant web-like structure of dark matter, arrayed in vast filaments between the galaxies.
A team including Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) researchers Norbert Werner and Aurora Simionescu and led by Jorg Dietrich of the University of Michigan, has presented evidence for the first detection of the presence of a cosmic web filament.
The filament in question stretches between two large galaxy clusters, known as Abell 222 and 223. The team's evidence for a filament is two-fold, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
On one hand, they were able to reconstruct the mass distribution of the two clusters and the region in between them using the technique of weak gravitational lensing.
Weak lensing is where a concentration of mass subtly distorts the observed shapes of background objects because of the way matter bends light.
In the case of the current measurement, weak lensing observations revealed that the mass distribution included an overdense filament between the two clusters.
From the X-ray data, they estimate that the mass of this collection of hot ordinary matter in the filament is about 6 trillion times the mass of the Sun.
Even so, it is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the filament, which they estimate from the measurements to be ten or more times that, so that 90 per cent or more of the filament mass is in the form of dark matter, consistent with predictions that
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