Cosmologists have produced the biggest map yet of the Universe’s structure and they find it less lumpy than previous surveys have suggested.
The new results, part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey (DES), charted the distribution of matter in part by measuring the way that mass bends light, an effect known as gravitational lensing. The Universe was extremely smooth, with matter evenly distributed in its infancy nearly 14 billion years ago, but mass has been clumping together ever since into galaxies, gas clouds and other structures. Data released by the DES team on 3 August suggest that the clumping has happened more slowly than indicated by earlier estimates, which were based on baby pictures of the Universe made by measuring the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
The difference in the results produced by the two techniques is still within the margins of error in both sets of measurements, say the survey leaders. A smaller gravitational-lensing survey, the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) also found a similar discrepancy last year1.
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