Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2000-03-01
Nature 405 (2000) 143-149
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
18 pages, 5 figures: To appear in Nature. (This replacement fixes tex errors and typos.)
Scientific paper
Most of the matter in the universe is not luminous and can be observed directly only through its gravitational effect. An emerging technique called weak gravitational lensing uses background galaxies to reveal the foreground dark matter distribution on large scales. Light from very distant galaxies travels to us through many intervening overdensities which gravitationally distort their apparent shapes. The observed ellipticity pattern of these distant galaxies thus encodes information about the large-scale structure of the universe, but attempts to measure this effect have been inconclusive due to systematic errors. We report the first detection of this ``cosmic shear'' using 145,000 background galaxies to reveal the dark matter distribution on angular scales up to half a degree in three separate lines of sight. The observed angular dependence of this effect is consistent with that predicted by two leading cosmological models, providing new and independent support for these models.
Bernstein Gary
Dell'Antonio Ian
Kirkman David
Tyson Anthony J.
Wittman David Michael
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