Hubble Telescope Maps Dark Matter in 3D

dido writes "The BBC reports that the Hubble Space Telescope has been used to make a map of the dark matter distribution of the universe, providing the best evidence of the role dark matter plays in the structure and evolution of the universe. From the article: 'According to one researcher, the findings provide "beautiful confirmation" of standard theories to explain how structures in the Universe evolved over billions of years.'"

Comments

Re:dark matter does not exist

[ceoyoyo]

Isn't that exactly what they did? They measured mass distributions through gravitational lensing and noted the places where there was more apparent mass then there should be. You can theorize that gravity works strangely at large scales, and inconsistently too, since they found clumps, but the simplest explanation that matches the observations is that there is something with mass that we can't see. It might be normal matter, but the fact that there's an enormous amount of it and it somehow avoids rubbing together and getting hot like all the other matter we know of is problematic. When galaxies collide it also seems to just keep on going while the normal matter slows down when it hits something going the other direction. Given those two observations (dark and appears not to interact other than gravitationally), a subatomic particle isn't so bad an explanation. It's not so far fetched either -- we know of other particles that have those properties. They're called neutrinos.