“Last summer, astronomers used a really clever observing strategy to present the best evidence to date that dark matter, once dismissed as a hare-brained idea, really does make up most of the mass of the universe. The image above does it again, in a slightly different way.”
This image is of the galaxy cluster CL0024+1652, a galactic city located a whopping 5 billion light years away! That means the light we see from this cluster left it five billion years ago, so we’re seeing this structure as it was when the Universe was just 2/3 its present age. Almost every small object in that image is a galaxy…
“Glennys Farrar of New York University described some startling hints of a fifth force of nature, on top of the Fab Four: electromagnetism, gravity, and the two forces that govern atomic nuclei. ”
Astronomers have mapped the cosmic “scaffold” of dark matter upon which stars and galaxies are assembled.