After 10 years of observing the shapes of 61 million distant galaxies, the UNIONS (Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey) collaboration is sharing data that provides strong evidence supporting the standard model of cosmology that the universe is dominated by dark matter and dark energy.
The banner image shows the UNIONS dark matter map projected onto the two hemispheres of the sky, with the Milky Way as seen by ESA's Gaia mission in the background. Dark blue marks regions denser than average, white the emptier voids between them. The gaps within the survey are from areas where the observations have not yet been processed. In the future, these missing regions of the dark matter map will be filled in. [Image credit: Calum Murray, Cail Daley, Andreas Tersenov]
"Previous work by other groups focused on the southern sky. What makes these data so exciting is that we used them to make the largest dark matter map of the northern sky," said WCA's Dr. Mike Hudson, lead of the UNIONS weak lensing team. “These results deepen our understanding of dark matter and the formation of structure in the universe."
Read the full article and watch the dark matter map video on Waterloo News.