AI Discovers Dark Matter Bridges
Artificial Intelligence created a new map of how dark matter is spread in the Universe based on the spread and movement of galaxies.
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
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Galaxies are like glowing pearls hiding the cosmic web that lays in the void of our Universe. It seems that the fibers of the cosmic web are made from matter and dark matter. But observing them is incredibly hard as they are almost invisible.
Regular matter itself is hard to find and we aren’t even talking about dark matter. We cannot observe this substance directly and the only way to find it is through the gravitational effects it has on the visible objects in our Universe.
The ironic part is that it is easier to study dark matter structures very far away rather than the ones near us. This is because they are much simpler than the structures around us. Our current attempts at reconstructing the cosmic web are based on a model of when the Universe was still young and then simulate its evolution through the billions of years. But the problem is that these simulations are incredibly difficult and the results aren’t as detailed as we’d want to and thus don’t allow us to estimate the situation in the nearby Universe.
Recently a team of international experts decided to approach the problem quite differently. They trained an AI to create a new map of how dark matter is spread in our local part of the Universe.
The AI in question used information about the spread and movement of galaxies and modeled the spread of dark matter based on that. The researchers trained the AI with an advanced simulation of the Universe called Illustris-TNG. And they specifically chose simulated galaxies similar to the Milky Way.
In the end, the scientists reconstructed the spread of dark matter near the Milky Way. They found several interesting structures including several smaller threads of the cosmic web made from dark matter that connect galaxies in our vicinity just like bridges including our own Milky Way.
Scientists now think that it is dark matter that dominates the dynamics of the Universe and thus controls the evolution of its structures. That is why it is important to know their arrangement as well as possible even at a local level.
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Since there is no proof for the existence of dark matter, it is just a model at best to explain some inconsistencies with current concepts (like the red shift). So they created a model from a model. Pure speculation, but at least they could post some nice pics and have a paper for their cv´s.