It's sort of like there were vast strings or sheets of glass prisms out there messing up the images of the galaxies, with more distortion corresponding to a greater number of prisms. "If we were able to see the dark matter from Earth it would be a very complex network of filaments and sheets," Van Waerbeke told Discovery News. That sort of cobwebby structure matches computer models which predict that the visible matter in the universe--clusters and super clusters of galaxies--are just the small lights in much vaster clusters of dark matter. All of it is expanding and in some places still connected by filaments of dark matter--rather like very stringy Mozzarella cheese pulled from a hot pizza. "They're picking up these really large filaments," said astronomer Bhuvnesh Jain of the University of Pennsylvania. The filaments are 10 to a 100 times less dense than the clusters where filaments meet and things like galaxies collect, he explained. The filaments are of special interest to cosmologists studying the early universe because unlike in the clusters of light and dark matter where things have smashed together a lot, the filaments are relics of much earlier times, said Jain. "The structures that are providing all this action are still forming," Jain said. The filaments contain regular matter as well, he said, but so little that few stars or galaxies can form – thus far in the history of the universe, anyhow. Related Links: Larry O'Hanlon's blog: Earth Impacts |
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