ACT Lensing Map (IMAGE)
Caption
Researchers used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to create this new map of the dark matter. The orange regions show where there is more mass; purple where there is less or none. The typical features are hundreds of millions of light years across. The whitish band shows where contaminating light from dust in our Milky Way galaxy, measured by the Planck satellite, obscures a deeper view. The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang. “It’s a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it,” said Suzanne Staggs, director of ACT and Princeton's Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics. “The famous blue and yellow CMB image is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since.”
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ACT Collaboration
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