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In a new paper published this week (September 11), scientists described how small-scale concentrations of dark matter in galaxy clusters produce gravitational lensing effects 10 times stronger than expected.
Gravitational lensing occurs when a source of gravity is powerful enough to bend the structure of space itself, spacetime, causing light passing nearby to be deflected.
And galaxy clusters are the largest accumulations of dark matter in the Universe, containing hundreds to thousands of individual galaxies held together by gravity.
Clusters contain both large and small scale dark matter within all of their individual galaxies.
Massimo Meneghetti of the INAF (National Institute of Astrophysics) -Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Sciences of Bologna in Italy, the lead author of the study, said: “Clusters of galaxies are ideal laboratories to understand whether computer simulations of the Universe reproduce in a reliable what we can infer about dark matter and its interaction with light matter.
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