Clumpy darkmatter in 3D - now there is something new!
January 15th, 2007
This hubble map of dark matter distribution taken in 3D is really interesting.
The part that is new and most exciting is that there are patches of dark matter where there is no visible baryonic matter, and there are other patches where there is baryonic matter but no dark matter.
The normal matter collect collects within the densest concentration of dark matter, so I would have expected every notable structure to be surrounded by darkmatter. Which is not the case. Just the dark matter without the baryonic matter can probably be explained away (but they are a bit strange) but not other way around.
The results are based on about half a million observations of distortion of galaxies’s shape coming from gravitational lensing effect. The data was combined from the Sabaru telescope, the large telescope in Chile, Hubble observations and Newton X-ray satellite.
Source: Massey, R. et al., Dark matter maps reveal cosmic scaffolding, doi:10.1038/nature05497, 7 January 2007 and various other websites.
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