The Invisible Cosmos - In 3D No Less

A team of European, American and Japanese astronomers are about to unveil a 3D model of something that's essentially invisible.

Using the Hubble telescope and "gravitational lensing" they've created a model of the black matter in the universe and there's a lot more of it than we've ever expected. Gravitational lensing detects the bending of light from stars that is caused by the enormous mass of the dark matter.

How much dark matter is there? Lots. It makes up most of the universe and the research shows it to be like a scaffold around which the visible universe - the planets, stars and galaxies - are organized. To help you out, Princeton University has created this dark matter model in which the invisible is made visible:



Now, get your mind around this. The dark matter map is said to stretch halfway back to the beginning of the universe. It's a map of something that's invisible to us that stretches billions and billions of years back in time.

Now that the researchers know where the dark matter is to be found, in a way sort of, they're taking on the next challenge of figuring out just what it is.