Giant Sheets Of Dark Matter Detected

Wandering Wombat writes "The largest structures in the universe have been, if not directly found, then at least detected and pounced upon by scientists. 'The most colossal structures in the universe have been detected by astronomers who tuned into how the structures subtly bend galactic light. The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form gigantic features stretching across more than 270 million light-years of space — three times larger than any other known structure and 2,000 times the size of our own galaxy. Because the dark matter, by definition, is invisible to telescopes, the only way to detect it on such grand scales is by surveying huge numbers of distant galaxies and working out how their images, as seen from telescopes, are being weakly tweaked and distorted by any dark matter structures in intervening space.' By figuring how to spot the gigantic masses of dark matter, hopefully we can get a better understanding of it and find smaller and smaller structures."

Comments

Re:How can they tell this is caused by Dark Matter

[orclevegam]

I would have thought that even with adaptive optics, this would be within the margin of error of our own atmosphere's lensing. I was kind of thinking the same thing. Seems like if they're seeing distortion then occam's razor would tend to dictate it's coming from the instruments used to do the measuring. Of course, if they can prove the distortion isn't being caused by the instruments, or other interference, they still need to prove that some other known property doesn't explain the distortion.

Re:So ...

[ArAgost]

...which yields 42. (This one was for moderators that quite didn't get it)