Physicists Find Oldest Dark Matter Yet With Microwave Lens
Researchers have just studied the oldest lensing of light we can see and found the oldest dark matter ever observed, around a galaxy 12 billion years old. They spotted this dark matter by looking at how some galaxies bend the cosmic microwave background light, the earliest detectable radiation after the Big Bang, that rocked the universe as we know it. The team’s research is published in Physical Review Letters. “Most researchers use source galaxies to measure the distribution of dark matter from now to eight billion years ago,” said Yuichi Harikane, astronomer at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo and co-author of a recent paper, in a Nagoya University release. . “However, we were able to look further into the past because we used the CMB further afield to measure dark matter. For the first time, we’re measuring dark matter almost from the early days of the universe.” Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, although we cannot detect it directly