Pionnering the ICL experiment for dark matter

In force date
Call year
2021
Investigator
Ignacio
Trujillo Cabrera
Financial institution
Amount granted to the IAC Consortium
160.932,00 €
Description

The ultimate nature of dark matter remains a mystery despite making up 25% of the Universe. We have found a novel way to see the distribution of dark matter more accurately than any other luminous indicator used to date: the diffuse light in clusters of galaxies, the intracluster light (ICL). In this project: PICLE-DM: Pioneering the ICL Experiment for Dark Matter, we will take advantage of this new observational technique to explore potential dissimilarities between the distribution of ICL and dark matter in clusters of galaxies to determine, for the first time, whether dark matter self-interacts. This project will use state-of-the-art processing techniques and dedicated observations to achieve this scientific objective, based at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) under the supervision of Dr Ignacio Trujillo. This project is timely as new revolutionary ultradeep imaging surveys allow us to measure the ICL with unprecedented precision, finally solving the mystery of what forms dark matter.

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