this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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[โ€“] teft 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh man that is super cool. They used gravitational lensing to infer the presence of dark matter in the intergalactic medium.

[โ€“] i_am_a_cardboard_box 8 points 1 year ago

It is pretty cool, but it's a bit misleading.. They didn't 'see' dark matter, because it doesn't interact with light or any particles. But they detected weak gravitational lensing caused by the dark matter (or any alternative source of the gravity we've coined dark matter), so this is not really conclusive physical evidence of dark matter.

But I'm no expert, please let people with astrophysics background correct me if I'm wrong.