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Cosmology

Shedding light on dark matter

Nature volume 400, pages 819–820 (1999)Cite this article

Over 2,000 years ago, the Greeks thought they had it all worked out. In their cosmology, the entire Universe was composed of four elements: earth, wind, fire and water. Now, despite several millennia of effort, modern cosmologists are significantly worse off. We have no idea what the bulk of the Universe is composed of. We cannot even tell whether the majority of matter in the Universe is in some microscopic form (such as axions or other exotic particles) or in some macroscopic form (such as brown dwarfs or primordial black holes). Our ignorance of the mass of the basic building blocks of the Universe spans a good 50 orders of magnitude. In a paper in the Astrophysical Journal last month, Metcalf and Silk1 propose that, by observing the gravitational effects of matter on the light from distant supernovae, it is possible to distinguish between microscopic and macroscopic forms of matter.

Although the idea of using supernovae as a cosmological probe of the matter distribution in the Universe has been suggested previously2,3,4, Metcalf and Silk are able to include recent developments in our characterization of type Ia supernovae along with a full analysis of the gravitational effect of different distributions of matter on the observed supernovae brightness. In so doing they make a concrete proposal for a fundamental test of the ‘dark matter’ which, if successful, would be an important step forward in understanding the essential composition of the Universe.

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Figure 1: The observed brightness of supernovae at a redshift of one, corresponding to a time of explosion halfway back to the Big Bang.
Figure 2: A type Ia supernova (SN1994D) imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Peter Challis, Center for Astrophysics

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  1. Albert Einstein Institute (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Am Mühlenberg 5, D-14476, Golm, Germany

    Daniel E. Holz

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  1. Daniel E. Holz
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Holz, D. Shedding light on dark matter. Nature 400, 819–820 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/23589

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