Just as a wine glass distorts an image showing temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background in this photo illustration, large objects like galaxy clusters and galaxies can similarly distort this light to produce lensing effects. (Credit: Emmanuel Schaan and Simone Ferraro/Berkeley Lab)

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Mapping Dark Matter and Dark Energy with a cosmic filter

The cosmic microwave background — light left over from immediately after the big bang — could be used to map out the structure of the universe, thus uncovering the secrets of dark matter and dark energy.

Robert Lea
Predict
Published in
6 min readMay 9, 2019

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The patterning of the earliest known light in our universe — the cosmic microwave background (CMB)— holds many important clues to the development and distribution of large-scale structures such as galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Distortions in the CMB — emitted 380,000 years after the big bang — caused by a phenomenon known as lensing, can reveal the fine structure of the universe. This also means it can potentially tell us things about the mysterious, unseen ‘dark universe’ — dark energy, which makes up about 68% of the universe and accounts for its accelerating expansion, and dark matter — which accounts for about 27% of the universe.

The Universe from the bottom of a swimming pool

Imagine the Universe as a grid pattern printed on the bottom of a swimming pool. The gravitational effects of matter and energy are added in much like water filling the pool. We view the bottom through the water — stretched and…

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Robert Lea
Robert Lea

Written by Robert Lea

Freelance science journalist. BSc Physics. Space. Astronomy. Astrophysics. Quantum Physics. SciComm. ABSW member. WCSJ Fellow 2019. IOP Fellow.

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