New map of the universe’s cosmic growth supports Einstein’s theory of gravity

Researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration have submitted a set of papers to The Astrophysical Journal featuring a groundbreaking new map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the sky, extending deep into the cosmos, that confirms Einstein’s theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the 14-billion-year life span of the universe.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, ancient light emitted when the universe was in its infancy, has travelled billions of years, witnessing the formation of stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. The gravitational fields of these massive objects have influenced the path of CMB light. At the left is the Big Bang; the wavy lines illustrate the distortion caused by the dark matter and regular matter of galaxies; at the right is an image of the warped light received by the Atacama Cosmological Telescope (ACT). At the lower left is the new map of the dark matter made by the ACT team, a visualization of all the matter in the path of the CMB light. The orange regions show where there is more mass; purple where there is less.
The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang.

“It’s a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it,” said Suzanne Staggs, director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. “The famous blue and yellow CMB image [from 2003] is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since.”