TITLE:
A Tentative Observation Design for Investigating the Morphology of Dark Matter in the Universe
AUTHORS:
Jing Liu, Zijia Lin, Ziheng Shan
KEYWORDS:
Cosmology, Dark Matter, Gravitational Microlensing, Apparent Superluminal Motion
JOURNAL NAME:
Natural Science,
Vol.12 No.11,
November
19,
2020
ABSTRACT: Unlike the luminous objects observed, dark matter
does not emit light but can be only detected by its gravitational effect.
Modern cosmology considers that most matter in Universe is dark matter.
However, it is still not clear what the dark matter was. Two origins have been
proposed by astrophysicists, astrophysics candidates and particle physics
candidates. The most differences are their morphology, the former are compact
objects and the latter are dispersed. Under Einstein’s theory of general relativity,
light bends as it passes near a compact object, creating a convergence effect
like a lens. When background light source, intervening lense and the observer
lie on a straight line, the brightness of the background source will be
significantly magnified. In astrophysics, this effect is called microlensing.
If compact dark matter is abundant in the universe, it is possible to
frequently observe “microlensing” events when observing high redshift objects, i.e. the objects temporarily brighten
for a certain time. The microlensing technique has been applied to study the
dark matter in halo of Milky Way. The difficulty occurs when applying to study
the cosmic dark matter as the crossing time of cosmic microlensing events is too long for observations.
Apparent superluminal jets in bright quasars are idea background objects,
significantly enhancing the efficiency of cosmic microlensing survey. Here, we
tentatively designed an observational experiment to study the morphology of
dark matter in Universe via statistics of microlensing events towards luminous
quasars with apparent superluminal jets.