Monday, January 08, 2007

Detecting Dark Matter No Longer a Massive Task

When astronomers at the Hawaii-based Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) atop the summit of Mauna Kea combined this new instrument with automated pattern-recognition software that scanned the CCD images for lensing effects, they detected 43 gravitational-lens candidates in an area of the sky about 100 times that covered by the moon.