For decades, dark matter and its nature and location have remained elusive to cosmologists. Recently, a team of astronomers conducted a study to locate the mysterious substance, but the results show that there is not as much dark matter as previously theorized.

“Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!” Christian Moni Bidin of the Astronomy Department at la Universidad de Concepción in Chile says in the European Southern Observatory (ESO) press release. Moni Bidin also headed the study and was the lead author of the team research paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Dark matter is impossible to be seen or detected. It constitutes 74% of the mass in the Universe. How it is distributed around the Universe is unknown. Astronomers believe that dark matter is what causes and exerts the gravitational force around objects made of normal matter (i.e. everything that is not dark matter or dark energy), such as planets, stars, and galaxies.

In the past, astronomers considered that one certain location of dark matter would be around galaxies: a model known as the Standard Halo Model demonstrates how galaxies form and evolve. This model also states that they rotate as quickly as they do due to dark matter, which is thought to collect around the galaxies as a halo.

Working with the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, the team produced a model in hopes of finding the amount, mass, density, and distribution of dark matter around the Sun (the nearest best bet for finding the substance) and our very own galaxy (the Milky Way). Utilizing a hypothesized amount of dark matter based on a past model, they measured the motions of hundreds of stars (sometimes created from the influence of dark matter) as far as 13,000 light-years away from the Sun.

But what the team observed was a lack of dark matter instead; the conjectured density was significantly lower. “The mystery of dark matter has just become even more mysterious,” Moni Bidin states.

He and his colleagues will further investigate and analyze their results. According to their paper, if matters are consistent, the distribution of dark matter would have to

“reconcile the results with the DM paradigm. The interpretation of these results is thus not straightforward. We believe that they require further investigation and analysis, both on the observational and the theoretical side, to solve the problems they present.”

“Despite the new results,” Moni Bidin continues, “the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for. So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found.”

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As of two months ago, there is one less elusive particle for quantum scientists to track down: the Majorana fermion. A group of nanoscientists from the Kavli Institute, and from the Delft University of Technology’s Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM Foundation) in the Netherlands, has been able to detect the particle for the first time.

The Majorana fermion can revise scientists’ understanding of matter and anti-matter, change ideas about fundamental physics and cosmology, and revolutionize the construction of quantum computers.

The existence of the Majorana fermion, an elementary particle, was proposed by Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana in the 1930s. Majorana, who mostly researched neutrino masses, provided scientists a solution to a set of equations from which elementary particles can be deduced. Most have been found since then. Others, such as the Higgs boson, currently being hunted by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, have not.

All particles have their opposites, or an “anti” version. For example, the anti-particle of the electron is the positron. The Majorana fermion is special, unique to other particles: it is its own anti-particle, essentially made up of matter and anti-matter.

The research group was led by Dutch nanoscientist Leo Kouwenhoven, a professor of physics at TU Delft. Kouwenhoven and his team constructed a nanoscale electronic device, which they created with a nanowire combined with superconducting material and a strong magnetic field. After applying voltage to the device, they were able to detect the particles in the device, in which, according to TU Delft, “a pair of Majorana fermions ‘appear’ at either end of a nanowire.”

“If you take a solid material and you make the right combinations,” Kouwenhoven tells BBC News, “the natural particles living in these condensed matter structures will also obey this defining property of Majorana fermions – that a particle is equal its anti-particle.”

Not only would the discovery provide a better understanding of why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe, but it could also help physicists confirm a theory stating that dark matter is really composed of Majorana fermions. Dark matter, a mysterious substance that accounts for 74% of the universe, has been puzzling scientists for decades.

The Majorana fermion is also capable of changing the way quantum computers function. Computers made with these particles would be more stable than those that are composed of other particles. They would also be less sensitive to external stimuli. Microsoft, who partially funded the research, hopes to produce quantum computers in the future.

Kouwenhoven and his team published their research in the journal Science on April 12.

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Using BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey), a component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, scientists have produced the most accurate measurements of when dark energy arose and caused the universe to accelerate its expansion.

Martin White, of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division states in the press release, “BOSS’s first major cosmological results establish the accurate three-dimensional positions of 327,349 massive galaxies across 3,275 square degrees of the sky, reaching as far back as redshift 0.7 – the largest sample of the universe ever surveyed at this high density.” White is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, and chair of the BOSS science survey teams.

The notion that the universe is expanding came about in the 1920s, when American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that all of the galaxies whose light shift he measured had produced a red shift– they were moving away from the Earth. The universe is continuously accelerating in its expansion.

Accelerated expansion was announced only fourteen years ago. Astronomers believe that a mysterious force called dark energy is the cause of this accelerated expansion, which is believed to have first occurred seven billion years ago. Presently, dark energy makes up nearly 75% of the universe’s total mass and energy.

Since the proposal of dark energy, the idea of it and when it came about precisely remained elusive. But just last week, the group of scientists at Berkley created the most precise map of dark energy, which looks billions of years into the past.

In order to create a map of dark energy, and to determine when dark energy caused the universe to suddenly accelerate expansion, the team of scientists working with BOSS produced precise measurements of the distances between each of the hundreds of thousands of galaxies, while also analyzing the galaxies’ red shifts, which allowed them to calculate the rate of expansion. To determine the distances, BOSS used a technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation.

Baryon acoustic oscillation occurs when baryons (i.e. “ordinary” matter) cluster due to the pressure of sound waves that moved through the universe when the universe was still very young (not even 400,000 years old) and hot and having varied densities because of the mixture of light and matter.

The universe has not always been expanding; rather, the expansion has been slowing down due to the pull of gravity the universe placed on itself. While BOSS was creating the map, it was able to pinpoint when exactly dark energy suddenly “turned on,” and accelerated expansion: six billion years after the universe came into existence.

The map may produce insight into dark energy and what its nature is, and it can also help astronomers understand the structure of the universe, and its expansion rate.

“For the past 13 years, we’ve had a simple model of how dark energy works,” David Schlegel of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, BOSS’ principal investigator tells Space.com. “But the truth is, we only have a little bit of data, and we’re just beginning to explore the times when dark energy turned on. If there are surprises lurking out there, we expect to find them.”

Image Courtesy of   https://www.facebook.com/BerkeleyLab

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Shogo Masaki of the Department of Physics at Nagoya University and Masataka Fukugita and Naoki Yoshida of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IMPU) collaborated in an experiment to create a computer simulation that would hopefully figure out the location of dark matter. In late January, their experiment was successful.

The term intergalactic refers to the physical space between galaxies where matter is hardly distributed. Scientists previously thought that intergalactic space comprised of nothing, being only empty, and that galaxies, in contrast, have the highest concentration of matter. Masaki, Fukugita, and Yoshida, however, have discovered that these intergalactic zones are packed with clumps of dark matter.

In addition, they also learned that galaxies do not have clear, defined edges; instead, they “have long outskirts of dark matter that extend to their nearby galaxies” according to IMPU’s press release. These “outskirts” contain much of the matter – and dark matter – in the universe.

The existence of dark matter was proposed by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. Since then, there have been numerous experiments around the globe involving dark matter. Dark matter’s nature is still enigmatic: it is an invisible, dense substance, and it cannot even be detected by instruments. Scientists do know that dark matter takes up about 23% of the Universe, with dark energy taking up 72% and the rest (planets and stars, for example) only 4%.

Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, dark matter is not random – it is uniform and organized. Masaki and his colleagues gathered recent observational data of 24 million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and created a large simulation of matter distribution. With their knowledge of the large density of dark matter, they used gravitational lensing to find the substance’s location.

Because dark matter is so dense, it causes space and light from stars, galaxies, and other light-emitting objects to bend, making these celestial objects appear bigger and brighter. With gravitational lensing, Masaki and his colleagues measured how the galaxies’ light was bent, allowing them to locate dark matter.

Dark matter remains as elusive as ever: although we have found exactly where dark matter is, we still do not know what it is, but scientists are closer than ever to understanding the mysterious substance’s nature. Masaki, Fukugita, and Yoshida have published a paper describing details of their experiment in The Astrophysical Journal. A PDF of the preprint version is found here.

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An international team of astronomers has produced a map that covers a billion light-years worth of dark matter in the universe. Never before has dark matter been mapped on such a large scale.

Two members of the team, Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, presented their findings at the 119th meeting of American Astronomical Society, held last week.

The project took place at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLensS) in Hawaii and collected data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. For more than five years, the team accumulated images of ten million galaxies – six billion light-years away – from four different regions in the sky during each of the seasons. Essentially peering at the universe when it was but six billions years old, they studied  how dark matter warped the light emitted by the galaxies.

The process of producing the map was completed through a method called gravitational lensing, in which bodies (e.g. galaxies, or, in this case, dark matter) are so massive that they curve space-time and distort light, making it travel in a curve, rather than in a line. By studying the distortions of the galaxies’ light, the team was able to determine the structure of the dark matter and plot its distribution.

“It is fascinating to be able to ‘see’ the dark matter using space-time distortion,” says Waerbeke at the American Astronomical society meeting. “It gives us privileged access to this mysterious mass in the Universe which cannot be observed otherwise. Knowing how dark matter is distributed is the very first step towards understanding its nature and how it fits within our current knowledge of physics.”

The universe is more or less a cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies. Dark matter is impossible to be detected by itself, making it seem invisible, though it makes its presence known through warping space-time and light. The mysterious substance makes up a whopping 23 percent of the universe, with dark energy taking up 72 percent and everything else (stars, planets, etc.) only 4 percent.

With creating such a large map of the cosmic web, astronomers and cosmologists are becoming closer to understanding the nature of dark matter and, ergo, a large portion of the universe. Dr. Heymans, a lecturer of physics and astronomy, says, “By analyzing light from the distant Universe, we can learn about what it has travelled through on its journey to reach us.

We hope that by mapping more dark matter than has been studied before, we are a step closer to understanding this material and its relationship with the galaxies in our Universe.”

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Universe Day is an annual event that starts each December 31st at noon and runs until noon on January 1st. Universe Day seeks to pick up where Earth Day leaves off and to effectively solve our planet’s evolutionary problems from a universe evolutionary perspective.

“Universe Day is similar to Earth Day in that individuals and organizations all over the planet are encouraged to self-organize their own events to forward the Universe Day message. Universe Day is a no-ownership, no-egos, get-the-message-out-now event. Imitate it, adapt it, improve it. Steal it, even, if it hastens the spread of its message,” says Lawrence Wollersheim, Director of the Universe Institute and one of the founders of Universe Day.

The message behind Universe Day is derived in part from the wisdom of Albert Einstein, who said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” As many are aware, the challenges we now face on a planetary scale – such as radically increasing temperatures, nuclear and traditional wars, pollution, environmental degradation, lack of sustainability and a troubled global economy – have serious consequences.

Rather than allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed by these challenges, however, we can, as Einstein suggests, adopt an entirely new way of thinking. Such is the impetus behind Universe Day: to expand our approach to these issues by adopting the much broader Universe Evolutionary Worldview.

“The progressive evolution of the universe as a whole system is the power that sustains our physical existence – both personal and planetary. We are embedded in the unstoppable flow of the evolutionary process, which is the most dominant factor in all of life and in everything around us,” says Wollersheim.

“Recent innovations in cosmology and evolutionary biology have revealed more about the evolution of life and the cosmos in the last twenty years than in all the previous eras of human history combined, and our ability to accumulate more of this essential knowledge is accelerating. Humanity is now capable of understanding the full evolutionary scope of the biggest playing field there is – the universe.”

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A pair of two-billion-year-old clouds of gas are providing scientists with new clues about the origins of the universe this week. These recently discovered pockets of “pristine gas” have remained untouched since the time of the Big Bang, and have never been mingled with heavier elements forged by later stars — giving them the lowest measurement of “metallacity” in the universe.

The discovery will help to lend further credence to the Big Bang theory, as researchers have long believed that only the lightest elements in the universe formed immediately after it’s creation. The lack of dense metals in the pristine clouds, which formed just minutes after the initial Big Bang, serves as some of the first hard evidence of the theory’s accuracy.

In an interview with SPACE.com, astronomer Michele Fumagalli of UC Santa Cruz commented;

“It’s actually a very nice confirmation of the theory, because the theory predicts that in the first few minutes after the Big Bang, things like hydrogen and helium were produced and no metals. So, this is the first time that we have a very strong observation and evidence that indeed this theory is correct. It’s good news for cosmology.”

Distant objects in space are able to analyzed from Earth by rays of light that provide a “fingerprint” of the gases they contain, which is how it was discerned that these particular clouds contain only hydrogen and deuterium. The fact that such pockets of the universe exist uncontaminated by heavier elements is sufficient cause to reexamine the way stars disperse metals.

Originally, it was assumed that pristine gas was not locatable by scientists because heavy elements from early stars had been very thoroughly spread throughout the universe. Now that the clouds’ existence has been proven, researchers will be forced reconsider certain aspects of how matter travels through space.

Previous efforts have been made by scientists to find pristine gas, but this is the first successful attempt. An ongoing study of extragalactic gases revealed the clouds by chance near the constellations of Leo and Ursa Major. It is currently unknown how many other examples of pristine gas might exist throughout the universe, but the search is on for cosmologists.

Physicist John O’Meara of Saint Michael’s college was quoted by Discovery News explaining, ”One of our biggest questions in cosmology is how galaxies get the gas they need to form stars, and how they also sent out the remnants of stars into their surroundings.” Some researchers now theorize that pristine clouds may in fact be the source that feeds young galaxies the cold gas to create stars.

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