Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. Over the vastness of this time, the tiniest of initial asymmetries have grown into the large-scale structures we can see through our telescopes in the night sky: galaxies like our own Milky Way, clusters of galaxies, and even larger aggregations of matter or filaments of gas and dust.
How quickly this growth takes place depends, at least in today's universe, on a sort of wrestling match between natural forces: Can dark matter , which holds everything together through its gravity and attracts additional matter, hold its own against dark energy, which pushes the universe ever further apart?
"If we can precisely measure the structures in the sky, then we can observe this struggle," says LMU astrophysicist Daniel Grün. This is where telescopic observation projects come in, capturing large swaths of the sky very precisely in images. For example, there is the Dark Energy Survey with the Blanco telescope in Chile and the recently commissioned Euclid satellite. LMU scientists have been involved in both projects, including in leadership roles, for years.
Early in its history, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with equal amounts of matter and 'antimatter' -- particles that are matter counterparts but with opposite charge. ...
Galaxies Dark Matter Astronomy Cosmology Big Bang Space Telescopes Satellites
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