A group of international researchers, with the participation of the Chilean Sebastián López, astronomer from the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chileconducted a study in which iIdentified about 5,000 possible “gravitational lenses” and that could lead experts to understand the nature of dark matter.
According to the report published on the website of The counterthe experts used an artificial intelligence system to find these gravitational lenses, with which they will be able to make observations of the distant Universe like never before.
According to Lopez, “this is the first massive confirmation of gravitational lensing” and added that “these phenomena are distortions of space-time due to the presence of dark matter”.
Dark matter is matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic field, so we cannot see it, nor is it absorbed by materials, nor is it reflected. The interest of the scientific community in it is due to the fact that it represents 95 percent of the matter in the universe.
What are gravitational lenses?
Gravitational lenses are a phenomenon theoretically predicted by Albert Einstein, where an ultramassive object can bend light around it in a similar way to what happens with an optical lens, explains the Chilean astronomer.
In this way, gravitational lenses allow to amplify the images of very distant galaxies, which would be impossible to see with other methods. Also, would help to capture dark matter, which until now has not been possible to detect.
The data from the team of scientists were captured using instruments from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, with which they confirmed 68 of 77 sources studied, which indicates an effectiveness of the method of 88%.
“We want to change that. It is dark matter that distorts space, so by measuring the deflected light, the mass that should cause the warping can be determined.”, affirms López, who is also a doctor in Astrophysics from the University of Hamburg, Germany.