CiTR

Dark Matter Map of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey, by using gravitational lensing. The map covers about 1/30th of the entire sky and spans several billion light years. The map will be useful for 2 planned missions, ESA's Euclid mission, and NASA's WFIRST. (I interviewed Dr. Dominic Benford about WFIRST a few years ago). WFIRST is NASA's next big outer-space observatory mission after the James Webb Telescope. WF will help scientists learn more about cosmology, the beginning and ultimate fate of our universe, by learning more about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. DM is thought to hold the universe together, and DE is thought to be responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Planck measurements have provided astronomers with a very suitable model of the universe at its beginning, and as the universe is now. 70 % of the energy in the universe is believed to be dark energy. Dark matter makes up 25 % of the universe, and the stuff that we can see, is thought to compose about 5 % of the universe. Scientists have used gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering to make their measurements.



https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6913