Posted on by Jenny Winder

Euclid and the Geometry of the Dark Universe

Artist’s impression of Euclid Credit: ESA/C. Carreau

Euclid, an exciting new mission to map the geometry, distribution and evolution of dark energy and dark matter has just been formally adopted by ESA as part of their Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 progamme. Named after Euclid of Alexandria, the “Father of Geometry”, it will accurately measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe, bringing together one of the largest collaborations of astronomers, engineers and scientists in an attempt to answer one of the most important questions in cosmology: why is the expansion of the Universe accelerating, instead of slowing down due to the gravitational attraction of all the matter it contains?

In 2007 the Hubble Space Telescope produced a 3D map of dark matter that covered just over 2 square degrees of sky, while in March this year the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) measured the precise distance to just over a quarter of a million galaxies. Working in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths, Euclid will precisely measure around two billion galaxies and galaxy clusters in 3 dimensions in a wide extragalactic survey covering 15,000 square degrees (over a third of the sky) plus a deep survey out to redshifts of ~2, covering an area of 40 square degrees, the 3-D galaxy maps produced will trace dark energy’s influence over 10 billion years of cosmic history, covering the period when dark energy accelerated the expansion of the Universe.

The mission was selected last October but now that it has been formally adopted by ESA, invitations to tender will be released, with Astrium and Thales Alenia Space, Europe’s two main space companies expected to bid. Hoping to launch in 2020, Euclid will involve contributions from 11 European space agencies as well as NASA while nearly 1,000 scientists from 100 institutes form the Euclid Consortium building the instruments and participating in the scientific harvest of the mission. It is expected to cost around 800m euros ($1,000m £640m) to build, equip, launch and operate over its nominal 6 year mission lifetime, where it will orbit the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2 in the image below) It will have a mass of around 2100 kg, and measure about 4.5 metres tall by 3.1 metres. It will carry a 1.2 m Korsch telescope, a near infrared camera/spectrometer and one of the largest optical digital cameras ever flown in space.

Sun Earth Lagrange Points Credit: Xander89 via Wikimedia Commons

Dark matter represents 20% of the universe and dark energy 76%. Euclid will use two techniques to map the dark matter and measure dark energy. Weak gravitational lensing measures the distortions of light from distant galaxies due to the mass of dark matter, this requires extremely high image quality to suppress or calibrate-out image distortions in order to measure the true distortions by gravity. Euclid’s camera will produce images 100 times larger than those produced by Hubble, minimizing the need to stitch images together. Baryonic acoustic oscillations, wiggle patterns, imprinted in the clustering of galaxies, will provide a standard ruler to measure dark energy and the expansion in the Universe. This involves the determination of the redshifts of galaxies to better than 0.1%. It is also hoped that later in the mission, supernovas may be used as markers to measure the expansion rate of the Universe.

Find out more about Euclid and other Cosmic Vision missions at ESA Science

Lead image caption: Artist’s-impression-of-Euclid-Credit-ESA-C.-Carreau

Second image caption: Sun Earth Lagrange Points Credit: Xander89 via Wikimedia Commons

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Could ‘Mirror Neutrons’ Account for Unobservable Dark Matter?

Could mirror universes or parallel worlds account for dark matter — the ‘missing’ matter in the Universe? In what seems to be mixing of science and science fiction, a new paper by a team of theoretical physicists hypothesizes the existence of mirror particles as a possible candidate for dark matter. An anomaly observed in the behavior of ordinary particles that appear to oscillate in and out of existence could be from a “hypothetical parallel world consisting of mirror particles,” says a press release from Springer. “Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other.”

Theoretical physicists Zurab Berezhiani and Fabrizio Nesti from the University of l’Aquila, Italy, reanalyzed the experimental data obtained by the research group of Anatoly Serebrov at the Institut Laue-Langevin, France, which showed that the loss rate of very slow free neutrons appeared to depend on the direction and strength of the magnetic field applied.

This type of field could be created by mirror particles floating around in the galaxy as dark matter, according to the new paper. Hypothetically, the Earth could capture the mirror matter via very weak interactions between ordinary particles and those from parallel worlds.

Berezhiani and Nesti’s abstract:

Present experiments do not exclude that the neutron transforms into some invisible degenerate twin, so called mirror neutron, with an appreciable probability. These transitions are actively studied by monitoring neutron losses in ultra-cold neutron traps, where they can be revealed by their magnetic field dependence. In this work we reanalyze the experimental data acquired by the group of A.P. Serebrov at Institute Laue-Langevin, and find a dependence at more than 5 sigma away from the null hypothesis…. If confirmed by future experiments, this will have a number of deepest consequences in particle physics and astrophysics.

The oscillations between the parallel worlds could occur within a timescale of a few seconds, the team says.

“Each neutron would have the ability to transition into its invisible mirror twin, and back, oscillating from one world to the other,” the authors say.

This isn’t the first time the existence of mirror matter has been suggested and has been predicted to be sensitive to the presence of magnetic field such as Earth’s.

“The discovery of a parallel world via … oscillation and of a mirror magnetic back-ground at the Earth, striking in itself, would give crucial information on the accumulation the of dark matter in the solar system and in the Earth, due to its interaction with normal matter, with far reaching implications for physics of the sun and even for geophysics,” the team writes in their paper.

Lead image caption: Artists concept of dark matter in the Universe. Credit: NASA

Sources: arXiv, PhysOrg, SciNews

Posted on by Jason Major

Dark Matter Makes a Comeback

The Milky Way an moonrise over ESO's Paranal observatory (ESO/H.H. Heyer)

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Recent reports of dark matter’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, according to a new paper from researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory announced in April a surprising lack of dark matter in the galaxy within the vicinity of our solar system.

The ESO team, led by Christian Moni Bidin of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, mapped over 400 stars near our Sun, spanning a region approximately 13,000 light-years in radius. Their report identified a quantity of material that matched what could be directly observed: stars, gas, and dust… but no dark matter.

“Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements,” Bidin had stated, “but it was just not there!”

But other scientists were not so sure about some assumptions the ESO team had based their calculations upon.

Researchers Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, have submitted a paper claiming that the results reported by Moni Biden et al are “incorrect”, and based on an “invalid assumption” of the motions of stars within — and above — the plane of the galaxy.

(Read: Astronomers Witness a Web of Dark Matter)

“The main error is that they assume that the mean azimuthal (or rotational) velocity of their tracer population is independent of Galactocentric cylindrical radius at all heights,” Bovy and Tremaine state in their paper. “This assumption is not supported by the data, which instead imply only that the circular speed is independent of radius in the mid-plane.”

The researchers point out the stars within the local neighborhood move slower than the average velocity assumed by the ESO team, in a behavior called asymmetric drift. This lag varies with a cluster’s position within the galaxy, but, according to Bovy and Tremaine, “this variation cannot be measured for the sample [used by Moni Biden’s team] as the data do not span a large enough range.”

When the IAS researchers took Moni Biden’s observations but replaced the ESO team’s “invalid” assumptions on star movement within and above the galactic plane with their own “data-driven” ones, the dark matter reappeared.

Artist's impression of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way. (ESO/L. Calçada)

“Our analysis shows that the locally measured density of dark matter is consistent with that extrapolated from halo models constrained at Galactocentric distances,” Bovy and Tremaine report.

As such, the dark matter that was thought to be there, is there. (According to the math, that is.)

And, the two researchers add, it’s not only there but it’s there in denser amounts than average — at least in the area around our Sun.

“The halo density at the Sun, which is the relevant quantity for direct dark matter detection experiments, is likely to be larger because of gravitational focusing by the disk,” Bovy and Tremaine note.

When they factored in their data-driven calculations on stellar velocities and the movement of the halo of non-baryonic material that is thought to envelop the Milky Way, they found that “the dark matter density in the mid-plane is enhanced… by about 20%.”

So rather than a “serious blow” to the existence of dark matter, the findings by Bovy and Tremaine — as well as Moni Biden and his team — may have not only found dark matter, but given us 20% more!

Now that’s a good value.

Read the IAS team’s full paper here.

(Tip of the non-baryonic hat to Christopher Savage, post-doctorate researcher at the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics at Stockholm University for the heads up on the paper.)

Posted on by Jason Major

The Secret Origin Story of Brown Dwarfs

Artist's impression of a Y-dwarf, the coldest known type of brown dwarf star. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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Sometimes called failed stars, brown dwarfs straddle the line between star and planet. Too massive to be “just” a planet, but lacking enough material to start fusion and become a full-fledged star, brown dwarfs are sort of the middle child of cosmic objects. Only first detected in the 1990s, their origins have been a mystery for astronomers. But a researchers from Canada and Austria now think they have an answer for the question: where do brown dwarfs come from?

If there’s enough mass in a cloud of cosmic material to start falling in upon itself, gradually spinning and collapsing under its own gravity to compress and form a star, why are there brown dwarfs? They’re not merely oversized planets — they aren’t in orbit around a star. They’re not stars that “cooled off” — those are white dwarfs (and are something else entirely.) The material that makes up a brown dwarf probably shouldn’t have even had enough mass and angular momentum to start the whole process off to begin with, yet they’re out there… and, as astronomers are finding out now that they know how to look for them, there’s quite a lot.

So how did they form?

According to research by Shantanu Basu of the University of Western Ontario and  Eduard I. Vorobyov from the University of Vienna in Austria and Russia’s Southern Federal University, brown dwarfs may have been flung out of other protostellar disks as they were forming, taking clumps of material with them to complete their development.

Basu and Vorobyov modeled the dynamics of protostellar disks, the clouds of gas and dust that form “real” stars. (Our own solar system formed from one such disk nearly five billion years ago.) What they found was that given enough angular momentum — that is, spin — the disk could easily eject larger clumps of material while still having enough left over to eventually form a star.

Model of how a clump of low-mass material gets ejected from a disk (S. Basu/E. Vorobyev)

The ejected clumps would then continue condensing into a massive object, but never quite enough to begin hydrogen fusion. Rather than stars, they become brown dwarfs — still radiating heat but nothing like a true star. (And they’re not really brown, by the way… they’re probably more of a dull red.)

In fact a single protostellar disk could eject more than one clump during its development, Basu and Vorobyov found, leading to the creation of multiple brown dwarfs.

If this scenario is indeed the way brown dwarfs form, it stands to reason that the Universe may be full of them. Since they are not very luminous and difficult to detect at long distances, the researchers suggest that brown dwarfs may be part of the answer to the dark matter mystery.

“There could be significant mass in the universe that is locked up in brown dwarfs and contribute at least part of the budget for the universe’s missing dark matter,” Basu said. “And the common idea that the first stars in the early universe were only of very high mass may also need revision.”

Based on this hypothesis, with the potential number of brown dwarfs that could be in our galaxy alone we may find that these “failed stars” are actually quite successful after all.

The team’s research paper was accepted on March 1 into The Astrophysical Journal.

Read more on the University of Western Ontario’s news release here.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Newly Discovered Satellite Galaxies: Another Blow Against Dark Matter?

Arp 302 consists of a pair of very gas-rich spiral galaxies in their early stages of interaction. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

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A group of astronomers have discovered a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars surrounding our Milky Way galaxy, stretching out across a million light years. The team says their findings may signal a “catastrophic failure of the standard cosmological model,” challenging the existence of dark matter. This joins another study released last week, where scientists said they found no evidence for dark matter.

PhD student Marcel Pawlowski and astronomy professor Pavel Kroupa from the University of Bonn in Germany are no strangers to the study – and skepticism — of dark matter. Together the two have a blog called The Dark Matter Crisis, and in a 2009 paper that also studied satellite galaxies, Kroupa declared that perhaps Isaac Newton was wrong. “Although his theory does, in fact, describe the everyday effects of gravity on Earth, things we can see and measure, it is conceivable that we have completely failed to comprehend the actual physics underlying the force of gravity,” he said.

While conventional cosmology models for the origin and evolution of the universe are based on the presence of dark matter, invisible material thought to make up about 23% of the content of the cosmos, this model is backed up by recent observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background that estimate the Universe is made of 4% regular baryonic matter, 73% dark energy and the remaining is dark matter.

But dark matter has never been detected directly, and in the currently accepted model – the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model – the Milky Way is predicted to have far more satellite galaxies than are actually seen.

Pawlowski, Kroupa and their team say they have found a huge structure of galaxies and star clusters that extends as close as 33,000 light years to as far away as one million light years from the center of the galaxy, existing in right angles to the Millky Way, or in a polar structure both ‘north’ and ‘south’ of the plane of our galaxy.

This could be the ‘lost’ matter everyone has been searching for.

They used a range of sources to try and compile this new view of exactly what surrounds our galaxy, employing twentieth century photographic plates and images from the robotic telescope of the Sloan Deep Sky Survey. Using all these data they assembled a picture that includes bright ‘classical’ satellite galaxies, more recently detected fainter satellites and the younger globular clusters.

Altogether, it forms a huge structure.

“Once we had completed our analysis, a new picture of our cosmic neighbourhood emerged,” said Pawlowski.

The team said that various dark matter models struggle to explain what they have discovered. “In the standard theories, the satellite galaxies would have formed as individual objects before being captured by the Milky Way,” said Kroupa. “As they would have come from many directions, it is next to impossible for them to end up distributed in such a thin plane structure.”

Many astronomers, including astrophysicist Ethan Siegel in his Starts With a Bang blog, say the big picture of dark matter does a good job of explaining the structure of the Universe.

Siegel asks if any studies refuting dark matter “allow us to get away with a Universe without dark matter in explaining large-scale structure, the Lyman-alpha forest, the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, or the matter power spectrum of the Universe? The answers, at this point, are no, no, no, and no. Definitively. Which doesn’t mean that dark matter is a definite yes, and that modifying gravity is a definite no. It just means that I know exactly what the relative successes and remaining challenges are for each of these options.”

However, via Twitter today Pawlowski said, “Unfortunately the big picture of dark matter being reportedly fine only helps if looking from far away or with broken glasses.”

One explanation for how this structure formed is that the Milky Way collided with another galaxy in the distant past.

“The other galaxy lost part of its material, material that then formed our Galaxy’s satellite galaxies and the younger globular clusters and the bulge at the galactic centre.” said Pawlowski. “The companions we see today are the debris of this 11 billion year old collision.”

The team wrote in their paper: “If all the satellite galaxies and young halo clusters have been formed in an encounter between the young Milky Way and another gas-rich galaxy about 10-11 Gyr ago, then the Milky Way does not have any luminous dark-matter substructures and the missing satellites problem becomes a catastrophic failure of the standard cosmological model.”

“We were baffled by how well the distributions of the different types of objects agreed with each other,” said Kroupa. “Our model appears to rule out the presence of dark matter in the universe, threatening a central pillar of current cosmological theory. We see this as the beginning of a paradigm shift, one that will ultimately lead us to a new understanding of the universe we inhabit.”

Read the team’s paper.

Source: Royal Astronomical Society

Posted on by Jason Major

The Case of the Missing Dark Matter

Artist's impression of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way. (ESO/L. Calçada)

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A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.

The 2.2m MPG-ESO telescope, used in the survey. (ESO/H.H.Heyer)

Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it… up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.

A team of astronomers at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust… but no dark matter.

“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” said team leader Christian Moni Bidin of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”

Based on the team’s results, the dark matter halos thought to envelop galaxies would have to have “unusual” shapes — making their actual existence highly improbable.

Still, something is causing matter and radiation in the Universe to behave in a way that belies its visible mass. If it’s not dark matter, then what is it?

“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for,” Bidin said. “So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found.

“Our results contradict the currently accepted models. The mystery of dark matter has just became even more mysterious.”

Read the release on the ESO site here.

Posted on by Jason Major

Finding Out What Dark Matter Is – And Isn’t

This dwarf spheroidal galaxy is a satellite of our Milky Way and is one of 10 used in Fermi's dark matter search. (Credit: ESO/Digital Sky Survey 2)


Astronomers using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope have been looking for evidence of suspected types of dark matter particles within faint dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way — relatively “boring” galaxies that have little activity but are known to contain large amounts of dark matter. The results?

These aren’t the particles we’re looking for.

80% of the material in the physical Universe is thought to be made of dark matter — matter that has mass and gravity but does not emit electromagnetic energy (and is thus invisible). Its gravitational effects can be seen, particularly in clouds surrounding galaxies where it is suspected to reside in large amounts. Dark matter can affect the motions of stars, galaxies and even entire clusters of galaxies… but when it all comes down to it, scientists still don’t really know exactly what dark matter is.

Possible candidates for dark matter are subatomic particles called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). WIMPs don’t absorb or emit light and don’t interact with other particles, but whenever they interact with each other they annihilate and emit gamma rays.

If dark matter is composed of WIMPs, and the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way do contain large amounts of dark matter, then any gamma rays the WIMPs might emit could be detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.

After all, that’s what Fermi does.

Ten such galaxies — called dwarf spheroids — were observed by Fermi’s Large-Area Telescope (LAT) over a two-year period. The international team saw no gamma rays within the range expected from annihilating WIMPs were discovered, thus narrowing down the possibilities of what dark matter is.

“In effect, the Fermi LAT analysis compresses the theoretical box where these particles can hide,” said Jennifer Siegal-Gaskins, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a member of the Fermi LAT Collaboration.

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So rather than a “failed experiment”, such non-detection means that for the first time researchers can be scientifically sure that WIMP candidates within a specific range of masses and interaction rates cannot be dark matter.

(Sometimes science is about knowing what not to look for.)

A paper detailing the team’s results appeared in the Dec. 9, 2011, issue of Physical Review Letters. Read more on the Fermi mission page here.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Distant Invisible Galaxy Could be Made Up Entirely of Dark Matter

The gravitational lens B1938+666 as seen in the infrared when observed with the 10-meter Keck II telescope. Credit: D. Lagattuta / W. M. Keck Observatory

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Astronomers can’t see it but they know it’s out there from the distortions caused by its gravity. That statement describes dark matter, the elusive substance which scientists have estimated makes up about 25% of our universe and doesn’t emit or absorb light. But it also describes a distant, tiny galaxy located about 10 billion light years from Earth. This galaxy can’t be seen in telescopes, but astronomers were able to detect its presence through the small distortions made in light that passes by it. This dark galaxy is the most distant and lowest-mass object ever detected, and astronomers say it could help them find similar objects and confirm or reject current cosmological theories about the structure of the Universe.

“Now we have one dark satellite [galaxy],” said Simona Vegetti, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the discovery. “But suppose that we don’t find enough of them — then we will have to change the properties of dark matter. Or, we might find as many satellites as we see in the simulations, and that will tell us that dark matter has the properties we think it has.”

This dwarf galaxy is a satellite of a distant elliptical galaxy, called JVAS B1938 + 666. The team was looking for faint or dark satellites of distant galaxies using gravitational lensing, and made their observations with the Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, along with the telescope’s adaptive optics to limit the distortions from our own atmosphere.

They found two galaxies aligned with each other, as viewed from Earth, and the nearer object’s gravitational field deflected the light from the more distant object (JVAS B1938 + 666) as the light passed through the dark galaxy’s gravitational field, creating a distorted image called an “Einstein Ring.”

Using data from this effect, the mass of the dark galaxy was found to be 200 million times the mass of the Sun, which is similar to the masses of the satellite galaxies found around our own Milky Way. The size, shape and brightness of the Einstein ring depends on the distribution of mass throughout the foreground lensing galaxy.

Current models suggest that the Milky Way should have about 10,000 satellite galaxies, but only 30 have been observed. “It could be that many of the satellite galaxies are made of dark matter, making them elusive to detect, or there may be a problem with the way we think galaxies form,” Vegetti said.

The dwarf galaxy is a satellite, meaning that it clings to the edges of a larger galaxy. Because it is small and most of the mass of galaxies is not made up of stars but of dark matter, distant objects such as this galaxy may be very faint or even completely dark.

“For several reasons, it didn’t manage to form many or any stars, and therefore it stayed dark,” said Vegetti.

Vegetti and her team plan to use the same method to look for more satellite galaxies in other regions of the Universe, which they hope will help them discover more information on how dark matter behaves.

Their research was published in this week’s edition of Nature.

The team’s paper can be found here.

Sources: Keck Observatory, UC Davis, MIT

Posted on by Jason Major

Astronomers Witness a Web of Dark Matter

Dark matter in the Universe is distributed as a network of gigantic dense (white) and empty (dark) regions, where the largest white regions are about the size of several Earth moons on the sky. Credit: Van Waerbeke, Heymans, and CFHTLens collaboration.

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We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t even interact with it… but dark matter may very well be one of the most fundamental physical components of our Universe. The sheer quantity of the stuff – whatever it is – is what physicists have suspected helps gives galaxies their mass, structure, and motion, and provides the “glue” that connects clusters of galaxies together in vast networks of cosmic webs.

Now, for the first time, this dark matter web has been directly observed.

An international team of astronomers, led by Dr. Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, used data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey to map images of about 10 million galaxies and study how their light was bent by gravitational lensing caused by intervening dark matter.

Inside the dome of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. (CFHT)

The images were gathered over a period of five years using CFHT’s 1×1-degree-field, 340-megapixel MegaCam. The galaxies observed in the survey are up to 6 billion light-years away… meaning their observed light was emitted when the Universe was only a little over half its present age.

The amount of distortion of the galaxies’ light provided the team with a visual map of a dark matter “web” spanning a billion light-years across.

“It is fascinating to be able to ‘see’ the dark matter using space-time distortion,” said Van Waerbeke. “It gives us privileged access to this mysterious mass in the Universe which cannot be observed otherwise. Knowing how dark matter is distributed is the very first step towards understanding its nature and how it fits within our current knowledge of physics.”

This is one giant leap toward unraveling the mystery of this massive-yet-invisible substance that pervades the Universe.

The densest regions of the dark matter cosmic web host massive clusters of galaxies. Credit: Van Waerbeke, Heymans, and CFHTLens collaboration.

“We hope that by mapping more dark matter than has been studied before, we are a step closer to understanding this material and its relationship with the galaxies in our Universe,” Dr. Heymans said.

The results were presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. Read the release here.

Posted on by Markus Pössel

Guest Post: The Cosmic Energy Inventory

The Cosmic Energy Inventory chart by Markus Pössel. Click for larger version.

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Now that the old year has drawn to a close, it’s traditional to take stock. And why not think big and take stock of everything there is?

Let’s base our inventory on energy. And as Einstein taught us that energy and mass are equivalent, that means automatically taking stock of all the mass that’s in the universe, as well – including all the different forms of matter we might be interested in.

Of course, since the universe might well be infinite in size, we can’t simply add up all the energy. What we’ll do instead is look at fractions: How much of the energy in the universe is in the form of planets? How much is in the form of stars? How much is plasma, or dark matter, or dark energy?


The chart above is a fairly detailed inventory of our universe. The numbers I’ve used are from the article The Cosmic Energy Inventory by Masataka Fukugita and Jim Peebles, published in 2004 in the Astrophysical Journal (vol. 616, p. 643ff.). The chart style is borrowed from Randall Munroe’s Radiation Dose Chart over at xkcd.

These fractions will have changed a lot over time, of course. Around 13.7 billion years ago, in the Big Bang phase, there would have been no stars at all. And the number of, say, neutron stars or stellar black holes will have grown continuously as more and more massive stars have ended their lives, producing these kinds of stellar remnants. For this chart, following Fukugita and Peebles, we’ll look at the present era. What is the current distribution of energy in the universe? Unsurprisingly, the values given in that article come with different uncertainties – after all, the authors are extrapolating to a pretty grand scale! The details can be found in Fukugita & Peebles’ article; for us, their most important conclusion is that the observational data and their theoretical bases are now indeed firm enough for an approximate, but differentiated and consistent picture of the cosmic inventory to emerge.

Let’s start with what’s closest to our own home. How much of the energy (equivalently, mass) is in the form of planets? As it turns out: not a lot. Based on extrapolations from what data we have about exoplanets (that is, planets orbiting stars other than the sun), just one part-per-million (1 ppm) of all energy is in the form of planets; in scientific notation: 10-6. Let’s take “1 ppm” as the basic unit for our first chart, and represent it by a small light-green square. (Fractions of 1 ppm will be represented by partially filled such squares.) Here is the first box (of three), listing planets and other contributions of about the same order of magnitude:

So what else is in that box? Other forms of condensed matter, mainly cosmic dust, account for 2.5 ppm, according to rough extrapolations based on observations within our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Among other things, this is the raw material for future planets!

For the next contribution, a jump in scale. To the best of our knowledge, pretty much every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in its central region. Masses for these SMBHs vary between a hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun and several billion solar masses. Matter falling into such a black hole (and getting caught up, intermittently, in super-hot accretion disks swirling around the SMBHs) is responsible for some of the brightest phenomena in the universe: active galaxies, including ultra high-powered quasars. The contribution of matter caught up in SMBHs to our energy inventory is rather modest, though: about 4 ppm; possibly a bit more.

Who else is playing in the same league? The sum total of all electromagnetic radiation produced by stars and by active galaxies (to name the two most important sources) over the course of the last billions of years, to name one: 2 ppm. Also, neutrinos produced during supernova explosions (at the end of the life of massive stars), or in the formation of white dwarfs (remnants of lower-mass stars like our Sun), or simply as part of the ordinary fusion processes that power ordinary stars: 3.2 ppm all in all.

Then, there’s binding energy: If two components are bound together, you will need to invest energy in order to separate them. That’s why binding energy is negative – it’s an energy deficit you will need to overcome to pry the system’s components apart. Nuclear binding energy, from stars fusing together light elements to form heavier ones, accounts for -6.3 ppm in the present universe – and the total gravitational binding energy accumulated as stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, other gravitationally bound objects and the large-scale structure of the universe have formed over the past 14 or so billion years, for an even larger -13.4 ppm. All in all, the negative contributions from binding energy more than cancel out all the positive contributions by planets, radiation, neutrinos etc. we’ve listed so far.

Which brings us to the next level. In order to visualize larger contributions, we need a change scale. In box 2, one square will represent a fraction of 1/20,000 or 0.00005. Put differently: Fifty of the little squares in the first box correspond to a single square in the second box:

So here, without further ado, is box 2 (including, in the upper right corner, a scale model of the first box):

Now we are in the realm of stars and related objects. By measuring the luminosity of galaxies, and using standard relations between the masses and luminosity of stars (“mass-to-light-ratio”), you can get a first estimate for the total mass (equivalently: energy) contained in stars. You’ll also need to use the empirical relation (“initial mass function”) for how this mass is distributed, though: How many massive stars should there be? How many lower-mass stars? Since different stars have different lifetimes (live massively, die young), this gives estimates for how many stars out there are still in the prime of life (“main sequence stars”) and how many have already died, leaving white dwarfs (from low-mass stars), neutron stars (from more massive stars) or stellar black holes (from even more massive stars) behind. The mass distribution also provides you with an estimate of how much mass there is in substellar objects such as brown dwarfs – objects which never had sufficient mass to make it to stardom in the first place.

Let’s start small with the neutron stars at 0.00005 (1 square, at our current scale) and the stellar black holes (0.00007). Interestingly, those are outweighed by brown dwarfs which, individually, have much less mass, but of which there are, apparently, really a lot (0.00014; this is typical of stellar mass distribution – lots of low-mass stars, much fewer massive ones.) Next come white dwarfs as the remnants of lower-mass stars like our Sun (0.00036). And then, much more than all the remnants or substellar objects combined, ordinary, main sequence stars like our Sun and its higher-mass and (mostly) lower-mass brethren (0.00205).

Interestingly enough, in this box, stars and related objects contribute about as much mass (or energy) as more undifferentiated types of matter: molecular gas (mostly hydrogen molecules, at 0.00016), hydrogen and helium atoms (HI and HeI, 0.00062) and, most notably, the plasma that fills the void between galaxies in large clusters (0.0018) add up to a whopping 0.00258. Stars, brown dwarfs and remnants add up to 0.00267.

Further contributions with about the same order of magnitude are survivors from our universe’s most distant past: The cosmic background radiation (CMB), remnant of the extremely hot radiation interacting with equally hot plasma in the big bang phase, contributes 0.00005; the lesser-known cosmic neutrino background, another remnant of that early equilibrium, contributes a remarkable 0.0013. The binding energy from the first primordial fusion events (formation of light elements within those famous “first three minutes”) gives another contribution in this range: -0.00008.

While, in the previous box, the matter we love, know and need was not dominant, it at least made a dent. This changes when we move on to box 3. In this box, one square corresponds to 0.005. In other words: 100 squares from box 2 add up to a single square in box 3:

Box 3 is the last box of our chart. Again, a scale model of box 2 is added for comparison: All that’s in box 2 corresponds to one-square-and-a-bit in box 3.

The first new contribution: warm intergalactic plasma. Its presence is deduced from the overall amount of ordinary matter (which follows from measurements of the cosmic background radiation, combined with data from surveys and measurements of the abundances of light elements) as compared with the ordinary matter that has actually been detected (as plasma, stars, e.g.). From models of large-scale structure formation, it follows that this missing matter should come in the shape (non-shape?) of a diffuse plasma, which isn’t dense (or hot) enough to allow for direct detection. This cosmic filler substance amounts to 0.04, or 85% of ordinary matter, showing just how much of a fringe phenomena those astronomical objects we usually hear and read about really are.

The final two (dominant) contributions come as no surprise for anyone keeping up with basic cosmology: dark matter at 23% is, according to simulations, the backbone of cosmic large-scale structure, with ordinary matter no more than icing on the cake. Last but not least, there’s dark energy with its contribution of 72%, responsible both for the cosmos’ accelerated expansion and for the 2011 physics Nobel Prize.

Minority inhabitants of a part-per-million type of object made of non-standard cosmic matter – that’s us. But at the same time, we are a species, that, its cosmic fringe position notwithstanding, has made remarkable strides in unravelling the big picture – including the cosmic inventory represented in this chart.

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Here is the full chart for you to download: the PNG version (1200×900 px, 233 kB) or the lovingly hand-crafted SVG version (29 kB).

The chart “The Cosmic Energy Inventory” is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. In short: You’re free to use it non-commercially; you must add the proper credit line “Markus Pössel [www.haus-der-astronomie.de]”; if you adapt the work, the result must be available under this or a similar license.

Technical notes: As is common in astrophysics, Fukugita and Peebles give densities as fractions of the so-called critical density; in the usual cosmological models, that density, evaluated at any given time (in this case: the present), is critical for determining the geometry of the universe. Using very precise measurements of the cosmic background radiation, we know that the average density of the universe is indistinguishable from the critical density. For simplicity’s sake, I’m skipping this detour in the main text and quoting all of F & P’s numbers as “fractions of the universe’s total energy (density)”.

For the supermassive black hole contributions, I’ve neglected the fraction ?n in F & P’s article; that’s why I’m quoting a lower limit only. The real number could theoretically be twice the quoted value; it’s apparently more likely to be close to the value given here, though. For my gravitational binding energy, I’ve added F & P’s primeval gravitational binding energy (no. 4 in their list) and their binding energy from dissipative gravitational settling (no. 5).

The fact that the content of box 3 adds up not quite to 1, but to 0.997, is an artefact of rounding not quite consistently when going from box 2 to box 3. I wanted to keep the sum of all that’s in box 2 at the precision level of that box.