Latest Structure formation Stories
ESA Cosmologists using data from ESA's Planck satellite have compiled the first all-sky image of the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the Universe as seen projected on the sky. This is made possible by analyzing the tiny distortions imprinted on the photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by the gravitational lensing effect of massive cosmic structures. As photons traveled through these structures, which consist primarily of dark matter, their paths became...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers at the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, the University of Leicester and NOAC Beijing have found large amounts of invisible "dark matter" near the Sun. They also found tantalizing hints of a new dark matter component within our own galaxy. The study results, which will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, are consistent with the theory that the Milky Way is surrounded by a massive...
SEATTLE - An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter whose total mass in the universe is more than five times that of "normal" matter (i.e., atoms). The nature of dark matter is still unknown. Its presence in the universe is inferred from its current influence within galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and...
ESA -- ESA's X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has for the first time allowed scientists to study in detail the formation history of galaxy clusters, not only with single arbitrarily selected objects, but with a complete representative sample of clusters. Knowing how these massive objects formed is a key to understanding the past and future of the Universe. Scientists currently base their well-founded picture of cosmic evolution on a model of structure formation where small structures form...
