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Quasar Distortions May Reveal Dark Matter Secrets
Developing
In Short: When light from a distant quasar is bent by a massive object, it creates multiple distorted images of the quasar. These images can provide clues about the nature of dark matter.
Researchers studying gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where the gravity of a massive object bends light from a more distant source, have proposed a new method to understand dark matter.
When light from a distant quasar is bent by a massive object, it creates multiple distorted images of the quasar. These images can provide clues about the nature of dark matter.
Simulations of dark matter behaving like waves now better match the observed positions of the multiple images of the quasar. This alignment supports the idea that dark matter could be composed of ultralight particles.
Astronomers have long relied on gravitational lensing to track dark matter, an invisible substance believed to make up 85 percent of all matter in the universe.
Dark matter does not interact with light, making it challenging to detect directly. However, its gravitational effects on visible matter and light can be observed.
The interference patterns created by overlapping waves of dark matter particles could explain the precise positioning of the quasar images, offering a new way to test theories about dark matter's composition.
What's still developing
- The researchers compared their predictions with the observed positions of multiple images of a well-studied quasar, whose light comes from an intensely bright galactic core.
- Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the findings suggest that high-resolution observations of lensed systems could help test the ultralight-particle explanation for dark matter.
- Dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, and it remains absent from the Standard Model of particle physics.
- The extremely low masses of those proposed particles would allow them to behave collectively like waves, giving this form of dark matter its nickname, “fuzzy” dark matter.
- Where the waves overlap, they can reinforce or cancel one another, producing interference patterns in the distribution of mass.