Cosmic dawn: The early universe 590 million years after the Big Bang. The green mesh shows a framework of dark matter, with the bright green denoting the most dense areas. The small dots denote young galaxies that are forming within the dark matter scaffold.
Credit: Orsi, A, Lacey CG, Baugh, CM, and Infante, L, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
"[Simulations like this] may be the only way we get to see dark matter," said Nichol. "We can't see it with our eyes or with our experiments."
The next step for Baugh's team is to look back in time and see how closely their simulation matches the actual cosmic dawn. Sadly, they don't have a time machine, but some of the galaxies they simulated are so far away that their light takes billions of years to reach Earth, giving a window into the distant past.
Currently, there is no telescope powerful enough to view such distant galaxies – but the answers may not be far off. The ultra-high resolution VISTA telescope in Paranal, Chile, is scheduled for completion within two years. It will carry out the Emission-Line galaxies with VISTA Survey (ELVIS), which will peer far enough across the universe to see galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang.
