New Map of Local Dark Matter Reveals ‘Bridges’ between Galaxies
A team of astrophysicists from the United States and Korea has created a new dark-matter distribution map using a neural network-based deep learning method and the data on positions and velocities of galaxies in the local Universe.
The 3D density map of the local dark matter: X-mark at the center denotes the Milky Way Galaxy; dots denote galaxies, and arrows denote estimated directions of motion derived from the gradient of the reconstructed gravitational potential. Image credit: Hong et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abf040.
“The 80% of the matter in the Universe is in the form of dark matter that comprises the skeleton of the large-scale structure called the cosmic web,” said Dr. Donghui Jeong, an astrophysicist in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at the Pennsylvania State University.
“As the cosmic web dictates the motion of all matter in galaxies and inter-galactic media through gravity, knowing the distribution of dark matter is essential for studying the large-scale structure.”
