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Detection of weak gravitational lensing distortions of distant galaxies by cosmic dark matter at large scales

3 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

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.

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astro-ph.CO 3

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2026 2 2021 1

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Weak Lensing with SKAO: Cosmic Shear Cosmology

astro-ph.CO · 2026-06-24 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Forecasts indicate SKAO cosmic shear can constrain S8 to 5% alone and 3% combined with LSST or Euclid, with added benefits from polarization and kinematics for separating lensing signals.

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