From its vantage point above Earth’s atmosphere, the Hubble Telescope has made important contributions to this area of research.
All cosmic stars function like giant recycling factories that take light chemical elements and convert them into heavier elements. The primitive, or primordial, composition of the universe is studied in detail. This detail is one of the keys to our understanding of the processes. which occurred in the first moments of the Universe.
Immediately after the first service mission, which successfully corrected the aberration in the Hubble mirror, a research team led by European astronomer Peter Jakobsen studied the nature of the gas filling the voids of the giant intergalactic drum. By observing ultraviolet light from a distant quasar, which was then absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, they discovered the long-sought signature of helium in the early universe. This is an important piece of evidence supporting the Big Bang theory. It also confirms scientists’ expectations that, in the early Universe, matter was not yet trapped in stars and galaxies were almost completely ionized (atoms were stripped of their electrons). This is an important advance in cosmology.
This study of helium in the early Universe is one of many ways Hubble uses distant quasars as beacons. When light from quasars passes through the material blocking between galaxies, the light signal is modified and reveals the composition of this gas.
These results complete important pieces of the puzzle about the entire composition of the Universe today and in the past.
Figure 1: The Cosmic Origins spectrograph is designed to study the large-scale composition and structure of the Universe (Source: https://cos.colorado.edu/)
During the 2009 service mission, the astronauts installed a new instrument to study this area. The Cosmic Origins spectrometer is designed to separate ultraviolet light from distant quasars into its component wavelengths and study how interfering materials absorb certain wavelengths but not others. This reveals the characteristics of different elements, telling us more about their diversity in different places in the Universe.
Today, astronomers believe that about a quarter of the mass-energy of the Universe is dark matter. It is a matter very different from ordinary matter made of atoms and the familiar world around us. The Hubble Telescope has played a key role in determining the amount of dark matter in the Universe and determining where it is found and how it behaves.
The riddle of the composition of the dark matter spectrum remains open, but extremely precise observations from the Hubble Telescope’s gravitational lens provide strong springboards for the future of this field.
Dark matter only interacts with gravity, meaning it does not reflect, radiate, or block light (or any other type of electromagnetic radiation). We cannot therefore observe it directly. However, Hubble’s study of how groups of galaxies bend the light passing through them allows astronomers to explain where this invisible mass is hiding. This means they can map where dark matter is found in a galaxy cluster.
Figure 2: This Hubble/Chandra/VLT composite image shows how dark matter (blue) and hot gas (pink) stand out in a colliding cluster.
One of Hubble’s major advances in this field was the discovery of how dark matter behaves when galaxy clusters collide. Studies of this number of galaxy clusters have shown that the location of dark matter (as resulting from gravitational lensing with Hubble) does not coincide with the distribution of hot gases (as seen in the X-ray positions by Hubble). -Newton or Chandra from NASA). This strongly supports theories about dark matter: we expect hot gases to slow down when they collide and the pressure to increase. Dark matter, on the other hand, is not affected by friction or pressure, so we expect it to pass through the collision relatively unimpeded. Hubble and Chandra observations have indeed confirmed that this is indeed the case we are talking about.
In 2007, an international team of astronomers used Hubble to create the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the Universe. It was constructed by determining the shapes of half a million galaxies observed by Hubble. Light from these galaxies travels – until it reaches Hubble – along a path interrupted by clumps of dark matter that distort the appearance of the galaxies. The astronomers used the observed deformation of the galaxies to reconstruct their original shapes and were then able to calculate the distribution of dark matter between these galaxies.
This map shows that ordinary matter, mainly in the form of galaxies, accumulates in places where the density of dark matter is highest. The resulting map travels back in time to the first half of the Universe and shows how dark matter forms into clusters when it collapses under gravity. Mapping the distribution of dark matter at smaller scales is fundamental to understanding how galaxies grow and cluster over billions of years. Tracking the growth of aggregation in dark matter could finally shed light on dark energy.
Dark energy is more fascinating than dark matter. Hubble telescope studies of the rate of expansion of the universe have shown that this expansion is actually happening faster. Astronomers explained this using the theory of dark energy, which pushes the expansion of the universe faster than ever, counteracting the pull of gravity.
According to Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2 tells us that energy and mass are interchangeable. Studies of the rate of cosmic expansion show that dark energy constitutes the largest fraction of the energy mass of the universe, far exceeding normal matter and dark matter: it appears to represent almost 70% of the mass energy of the universe. as we know it.
Although astronomers have been able to take steps toward understanding how dark energy works and effects, its true nature remains a mystery.
Source: VLTV
