An excess of small-scale gravitational lenses observed in galaxy clusters

post image

In a recently published paper Meneghetti et al. (2020) in Science, she and her collaborators report a new gap – an order of magnitude discrepancy – revealed using a precision metric  – the cross-section for galaxy-galaxy strong lensing, between cold dark matter simulations and observed cluster lenses. This suggests that there is a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models, or there is a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties.

2 Responses

  1. David Boyce at |

    Hello,

    I am enjoying reading ‘Mapping the Heavens.’ It is exciting and well written.

    David Boyce, PhD
    University of Pennsylvania, 1965
    retired and living in Scottsdale, AZ

    Reply

Leave a Reply