Dark Matter

There are many things in the Universe that are invisible to even our most advanced technology. Although we can't see them we know they are there by the way they affect the things we can see. One of these invisible ghosts is something called Dark Matter, which has been calculated to fill the Universe with five times as much mass as the so-called visible, or baryonic matter that we can detect. Baryonic matter is made of atoms. Dark Matter is not. Whatever Dark Matter is made of, it is something beyond the perception of Man, or his technology.

Now, a group of scientists from all over the world have collaborated, and devised a way to use the Hubble Space Telescope to show this Dark Matter for the first time ever, and just today have released a three dimensional image (shown below) of the shape of the dark matter in one small piece of the sky about the size of eight full moons.

The three dimensional image above is in fact a four dimensional image, because as well as showing the shape of Dark Matter in the three dimensions of space, it also shows the shape of Dark Matter over time. As the image below shows, Hubble took overlapping images looking 6.5 billion years into the past.

The scientists were able to image the Dark Matter using one of Einstein's teachings: that gravity bends light. We might not be able to see Dark Matter, but we know it has mass, and if it has mass, it has gravity, and if it has gravity it should deflect - ever so slightly - the light of distant galaxies. By measuring the shape of half a million galaxies going half way back to the beginning of the Universe, Scientists were able to see the shape of Dark Matter for the first time in Human history. And now they have made that image available to the world.

Then a comparison was made between the visible matter in the same area of space, and it was clear that the matter we can see, collects and accrues where the Dark Matter is densest, as the two photos below show. This confirms the hypothesis that Dark Matter is somehow the "scaffolding" of the Universe, giving structure to the visible atom-based matter that we can see.

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