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A Carinthian at the ESA

The physicist Marcos Bavdaz, who grew up in Carinthia, researches dark matter at the ESA.

Marcos Bavdaz was born in Brazil in 1961, but grew up in Carinthia. Today, he works for the European Space Agency (ESA), where he is primarily concerned with dark matter. Researchers have now succeeded in drawing a map of the universe showing the distribution of galaxies. It resembles a sponge. While the fibres of the sponge represent the galaxies surrounding dark holes, these in turn represent dark matter. And this is presumably responsible for the fact that the universe resembles a sponge, as Bavdaz explains. After the Big Bang, matter was initially quite evenly distributed. "But there were very slight fluctuations in density. These density fluctuations then increased, especially in the dark matter. This then attracted the normal matter so that stars and galaxies could primarily form there," continues the physicist.

No direct measurement possible

The term "dark matter" is due to the fact that it does not interact with light. It is completely dark and difficult to study because it can only be measured indirectly, says Bavdaz: "We can measure it by seeing irregularities in the light that we get from other objects that lie behind it. So if we have dark matter in the foreground [...] and if we observe galaxies that are much further away, then the light from these galaxies would be bent slightly. We could then use the measurement of this bending of the light to determine how much mass we had there."

The best way to make such measurements is with space telescopes. In the summer of 2023, the ESA sent one called EUCLID into space. It is intended to help researchers gain new insights into dark matter, as much of it is still a mystery. "That's what makes it so exciting," says Bavdaz.

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Source: red, kaernten.ORF.at

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