Astronomers create largest map of the Universe’s mysterious and invisible dark matter

An international team of researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Edinburgh has created a first ever large-scale map of dark matter in our Universe. The team, led in part by CIFAR’s Ludovic Van Waerbeke, used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to look at how light emitted by 10 galaxies travelled and got distorted on its way to Earth. Light gets distorted as it passes through dark matter, and by capturing images of this light travel from galaxies, the researchers were able to create a cosmic web of dark matter. Since dark matter is invisible, this new map allows scientists to finally ‘see’ dark matter for the first time. Their observations agreed with previous predictions from computer simulations. The team’s findings are ground-breaking because knowing how dark matter is distributed in the Universe will help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and the role it plays in our Universe.Read more