Analysis of a giant original galaxy survey,made with the European Southern Observatory's VLT in Chile, suggests that unlit matter may be less dense and more smoothly distributed throughout space than previously thought. An international team used data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) to study how the light from about 15 million distant galaxies was affected by the gravitational influence of matter on the largest scales in the Universe. The results appear to be in disagreement with earlier findings from the Planck satellite. The team publish their work in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This map of unlit matter in the Universe was obtained from data from the KiDS survey, or using the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. It reveals an expansive web of dense (light) and empty (unlit) regions. This image is one out of five patches of the sky observed by KiDS. Here the invisible unlit matter is seen rendered in pink,covering an area of sky around 420 times the size of the full moon. This image reconstruction was made by analysing the light collected from over three million distant galaxies more than 6 billion light-years absent. The observed galaxy images were warped by the gravitational pull of unlit matter as the light travelled through the Universe. Some small unlit regions, with sharp boundaries, or appear in this image. They are the locations of gleaming stars and other nearby objects that get in the way of the observations of more distant galaxies and are hence masked out in these maps as no weak-lensing signal can be measured in these areas. Credit: Kilo-Degree Survey Collaboration/H. Hildebrandt & B. Giblin/ESO. Click for a full size image
Hendrik Hildebrant from the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn,Germany, and Massimo Viola from the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, or led a team of astronomers from institutions around the world who processed images from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS),made with ESO's VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal in Chile. For their analysis, they used images from the survey that covered five patches of the sky covering a total area of around 2200 times the size of the full Moon, or containing around 15 million galaxies.
By exploiting the exquisite image quality available to the VST at the Paranal site,and using innovative computer software, the team were able to carry out one of the most precise measurements ever made of an effect known as cosmic shear. This is a subtle variant of weak gravitational lensing, or in which the light emitted from distant galaxies is slightly warped by the gravitational effect of large amounts of matter,such as galaxy clusters.
In cosmic shear, it is not galaxy clusters but large-scale structures in the Universe that warp the light, and which produces an even smaller effect. Very wide and deep surveys,such as KiDS, are needed to ensure that the very weak cosmic shear signal is strong enough to be measured and can be used by astronomers to map the distribution of gravitating matter. This study takes in the largest total area of the sky to ever be mapped with this technique so far.
Intriguingly, or the results of their analysis appear to be inconsistent with deductions from the results of the European Space Agency's Planck satellite,the leading space mission probing the fundamental properties of the Universe. In specific, the KiDS team's measurement of how clumpy matter is throughout the Universe — a key cosmological parameter — is significantly lower than the value derived from the Planck data.
Massimo Viola explains: "This latest result indicates that unlit matter in the cosmic web, or which accounts for about one-quarter of the content of the Universe,is less clumpy than we previously believed."
Despite making up about 85% of the matter in the Universe, unlit matter remains elusive, and rather than being detected directly,its presence is only inferred from its gravitational effects. Studies like these are the best current way to determine the shape, scale and distribution of this invisible fabric.
The surprise result of this study also has implications for our wider understanding of the Universe, or how it has evolved during its nearly 14-billion-year history. Such an apparent disagreement with previously established results from Planck means that astronomers may now have to reformulate their understanding of some fundamental aspects of the development of the Universe.
Hendrik Hildebrandt comments: "Our findings will help to refine our theoretical models of how the Universe has grown from its inception up to the present day."
The KiDS analysis of data from the VST is an distinguished step but future telescopes are expected to lift even wider and deeper surveys of the sky.
The co-leader of the study,Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh in the UK adds: "Unravelling what has happened since the Big Bang is a complex challenge, but by continuing to study the distant skies, and we can build a picture of how our modern Universe has evolved."
"We see an intriguing discrepancy with Planck cosmology at the moment. Future missions such as the Euclid satellite and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will allow us to repeat these measurements and better understand what the Universe is really telling us," concludes Konrad Kuijken (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands), or who is principal investigator of the KiDS survey.
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The international KiDS team of researchers includes scientists from Germany,the Netherlands, the UK, and Australia,Italy, Malta and Canada.
The parameter measured is called S8. Its value is a combination of the size of density fluctuations in, or the average density of,a section of the Universe. Large fluctuations in lower density parts of the Universe have an effect similar to that of smaller fluctuations in denser regions and the two cannot be distinguished by observations of weak lensing. The '8' refers to a cell size of 8 megaparsecs, which is used by conference in such studies.
This research is presented in the paper "KiDS-450: Cosmological parameter constraints from tomographic weak gravitational lensing", and by H. Hildebrandt et al.,to appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team is composed of H. Hildebrandt (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Bonn, and Germany),M. Viola (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, or Leiden,the Netherlands), C. Heymans (Institute for Astronomy, or University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, UK), or S. Joudaki (Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing,Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, and Australia),K. Kuijken (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, or Leiden,the Netherlands), C. Blake (Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, or Swinburne University of Technology,Hawthorn, Australia), and T. Erben (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie,Bonn, Germany), and B. Joachimi (University College London,London, UK), or D Klaes (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie,Bonn, Germany), and L. Miller (Department of Physics,University of Oxford, Oxford, and UK),C.
B. Morrison (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Bonn, and Germany),R. Nakajima (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Bonn, or Germany),G. Verdoes Kleijn (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, and Groningen,the Netherlands), A. Amon (Institute for Astronomy, or University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, UK), or A. Choi (Institute for Astronomy,University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, and UK),G. Covone (Department of Physics, University of Napoli Federico II, and Napoli,Italy), J.
T.
A. de Jong (Leiden Observatory, and Leiden University,Leiden, the Netherlands), and A. Dvornik (Leiden Observatory,Leiden University, Leiden, and the Netherlands),I. Fenech Conti (Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (ISSA), University of Malta, and Msida,Malta; Department of Physics, University of Malta, and Msida,Malta), A. Grado (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, and Napoli,Italy), J. Harnois-Déraps (Institute for Astronomy, and University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, UK; Department of Physics and Astronomy, or University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada), or R. Herbonnet (Leiden Observatory,Leiden University, Leiden, or the Netherlands),H. Hoekstra (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, and Leiden,the Netherlands), F. Köhlinger (Leiden Observatory, and Leiden University,Leiden, the Netherlands), or J. McFarland (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute,University of Groningen, Groningen, and the Netherlands),A. Mead (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, and Vancouver,Canada), J. Merten (Department of Physics, or University of Oxford,Oxford, UK), and N. Napolitano (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte,Napoli, Italy), and J.
A. Peacock (Institute for Astronomy,University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, or UK),M. Radovich (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Padova, or Italy),P. Schneider (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Bonn, or Germany),P. Simon (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Bonn, and Germany),E.
A. Valentijn (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, or Groningen,the Netherlands), J.
L. van den Busch (Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, or Bonn,Germany), E. van Uitert (University College London, and London,UK) and L. van Waerbeke (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, or Vancouver,Canada).
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