A Tentative Observation Design for Investigating the Morphology of Dark Matter in the Universe

Abstract

Unlike the luminous objects observed, dark matter does not emit light but can be only detected by its gravitational effect. Modern cosmology considers that most matter in Universe is dark matter. However, it is still not clear what the dark matter was. Two origins have been proposed by astrophysicists, astrophysics candidates and particle physics candidates. The most differences are their morphology, the former are compact objects and the latter are dispersed. Under Einstein’s theory of general relativity, light bends as it passes near a compact object, creating a convergence effect like a lens. When background light source, intervening lense and the observer lie on a straight line, the brightness of the background source will be significantly magnified. In astrophysics, this effect is called microlensing. If compact dark matter is abundant in the universe, it is possible to frequently observe “microlensing” events when observing high redshift objects, i.e. the objects temporarily brighten for a certain time. The microlensing technique has been applied to study the dark matter in halo of Milky Way. The difficulty occurs when applying to study the cosmic dark matter as the crossing time of cosmic microlensing events is too long for observations. Apparent superluminal jets in bright quasars are idea background objects, significantly enhancing the efficiency of cosmic microlensing survey. Here, we tentatively designed an observational experiment to study the morphology of dark matter in Universe via statistics of microlensing events towards luminous quasars with apparent superluminal jets.