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Twenty-five years of using microlensing to study dark matter

In 1993, two papers reported observations of an astronomical phenomenon called gravitational microlensing. The results showed that microlensing could be used to probe the elusive dark matter that is thought to pervade the Universe.
  1. Grzegorz Pietrzyński

    1. Grzegorz Pietrzyński is at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, 00-716 Warsaw, Poland.

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One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy is the nature of dark matter, which is thought to account for about 85% of the matter and 25% of the total energy in the Universe1. There are several strong pieces of evidence for dark matter2. In particular, spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have flat rotation curves3 — graphs that show the orbital speed of stars as a function of their distance from the galactic centre. This property indicates that spiral galaxies are surrounded by large quantities of unseen matter. Dark matter has not yet been detected directly, so its identity is still unknown. But 25 years ago, Alcock et al.4 and Aubourg et al.5 reported observations in Nature that paved the way to a better understanding of its properties.

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Nature 562, 349-350 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07006-8

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