The new data was collected by the CBI between September 2002 and May 2004. The results are based on a phenomenon of light known as polarization – CBI picks out the polarized light and it is the details of this light that reveal the motion of the seeds of galaxy clusters.
Working in close partnership with their colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, CITA scientists participated in every aspect of the research, from gathering data at the CBI site to providing complex analysis of the signals using the major supercomputing facilities at CITA.
Anthony Readhead, the principal investigator on the CBI project and a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, says the new polarization results provide strong support for the standard model of the universe as a place in which dark matter and dark energy are much more prevalent than everyday matter. This poses a major problem for physics, according to Readhead, who explains that current physics has no explanation for why dark energy dominates the universe. The researchers are now attempting to refine the polarization observations and studying the total intensity and polarization signals in the hope of finding clues to the nature of the dark matter and dark energy.
Funding for the research was provided by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the California Institute of Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Chilean Center for Astrophysics, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.