cold dark matter tagged posts

Astrophysicists in Italy have shed new light on the nature of matter from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detection of galaxies from 13 billion years ago and novel state-of-the-art numerical simulations of the first galaxies. The study adds another piece to the puzzle of the nature of matter in the universe.

While the commonly accepted paradigm of structure formation is based on non-relativistic matter that interacts only gravitationally, that is “cold” dark matter, alternative possibilities advocated to solve small-scale problems of the standard scenario rely on the hypothesis that dark matter is made of warm particles that possess a small, non-n...

Warm, cold, just right? Physicists at the University of California, Davis are taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe.

We have very little idea of what dark matter is and physicists have yet to detect a dark matter particle. But we do know that the gravity of clumps of dark matter can distort light from distant objects. Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis and colleagues are using this distortion, called gravitational lensing, to learn more about the properties of dark matter.

The standard model for dark matter is ...

This is a 3-D visualization of reconstructed dark matter clump distributions in a distant galaxy cluster, obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields data. The unseen matter in this map is comprised of a smooth heap of dark matter on which clumps form. Credit: Yale University

The dark matter map is derived from Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields data of a trio of galaxy clusters that act as cosmic magnifying glasses to peer into older, more distant parts of the universe, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan led an international team of researchers that analyzed the Hubble images...