Digging into dark matter with weak gravitational lensing

Understand

Ordinary baryonic particles (such as protons and neutrons) account for only one-sixth of the total matter in the Universe.

• The remainder is a mysterious "dark matter" component, which does not interact via the electromagnetic force and thus neither emits nor reflects light.
• However, evidence is mounting for its gravitational influence.
• The past few years have seen particular progress in observations of weak gravitational lensing, the slight deflection of light from distant galaxies due to the curvature of space around foreground mass.