{"id":308342,"date":"2026-01-28T17:27:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/308342\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T17:27:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T17:27:17","slug":"researchers-have-mapped-the-universes-dark-matter-like-never-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/308342\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Have Mapped the Universe\u2019s Dark Matter Like Never Before"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dark matter<\/a>\u2014the invisible scaffolding thought to hold galaxies together\u2014is arguably the most elusive substance in the universe. Nearly a century of research hasn\u2019t yet led to a confirmed direct detection<\/a>, but scientists have learned to observe it indirectly<\/a>. Now, one team has used those observations to produce the highest-resolution map of dark matter to date.<\/p>\n

The researchers created the map, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy,<\/a> by carefully measuring tiny changes in the shapes of hundreds of thousands of galaxies imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>. This allowed them to reconstruct the locations of mass\u2014including dark matter\u2014and map the invisible structure of the universe, lead author Diana Scognamiglio, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Gizmodo in an email.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t see dark matter directly, so we map it by watching how it bends light,\u201d Scognamiglio explained. \u201cAs light from very distant galaxies travels toward us, it is slightly distorted by the gravity of matter along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dark matter as we\u2019ve never \u201cseen\u201d it before <\/p>\n

Astronomers believe ordinary matter\u2014particles that interact with light and are therefore observable\u2014makes up only one-sixth of all matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter, which does not emit or absorb light. It interacts with the universe only through gravity.<\/p>\n

According to the standard model of cosmology, dark matter must exist in order for certain gravitational effects to make sense, such as the unexpectedly rapid rotation of galaxies or the fact that they\u2019re held together more tightly than they should be. The best way for scientists to indirectly \u201csee\u201d dark matter is by measuring its gravitational effects.<\/p>\n

Scognamiglio and her colleagues used weak gravitational lensing\u2014the subtle distortion of light from distant galaxies caused by the gravity of intervening mass\u2014to do exactly that.<\/p>\n

\"HubbleThis side-by-side shows the difference in resolution between Hubble\u2019s dark matter map and the new map created with JWST data \u00a9 NASA\/STScI\/A. Pagan <\/p>\n

High-resolution JWST images from the COSMOS-Web survey allowed the team to measure the shapes of 129 galaxies per square arcminute and reconstruct a matter map with an angular resolution of about 1 arcminute\u2014more than twice the resolution of earlier Hubble Space Telescope maps.<\/p>\n

\u201cJWST gives us much sharper images and lets us see fainter, more distant galaxies than other telescopes, like Hubble,\u201d Scognamiglio explained. \u201cThat means we have many more background galaxies to work with, and we can measure their shapes more precisely. More galaxies and sharper images translate directly into a sharper map.\u201d<\/p>\n

The map\u2019s brightest regions mark places where large amounts of mass are concentrated, usually signaling massive galaxy clusters. The faint, thread-like features that connect these bright spots trace the vast filaments that link galaxies together, while darker, smoother regions show where relatively little matter exists.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn simple terms, the map is a picture of the scaffolding of the universe,\u201d Scognamiglio said.<\/p>\n

A window into deep cosmic history <\/p>\n

The exceptional resolution of this new map not only provides a highly-detailed view of the universe\u2019s structure, it also allows astronomers to observe that structure much further back in time than previous maps have.<\/p>\n

It traces dark matter back to the era when galaxies were forming most actively, and therefore provides a benchmark for tests of the nature of dark matter as well as models of the galaxy environment during peak cosmic star formation roughly 8 to 11 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe map is consistent with our current cosmological model, which predicts that dark matter forms a web-like structure that galaxies grow within,\u201d Scognamiglio said. \u201c\u200b\u200bWith this sharper view, we can test those predictions more precisely and look for small differences that could hint at new physics, such as alternative dark matter properties or subtle departures from standard gravity.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hopes that their map will pave the way for new research into how galaxies are influenced by their dark matter environments. \u201cWe can now investigate how star formation, galaxy growth, and quenching [the shutting-down of star formation] depend on where galaxies sit within filaments and clusters,\u201d Scognamiglio explained.<\/p>\n

The quality of the data also opens the door to studying how matter evolves over time, she added. This will aid Scognamiglio\u2019s next project: producing three dimensional maps of the universe\u2019s mass. Next-generation space telescopes such as NASA\u2019s Nancy Grace Roman<\/a> and the European Space Agency\u2019s Euclid will support this work by producing high-resolution data that covers much larger areas of the sky.<\/p>\n

\u201cJWST shows us what is possible at ultra-high resolution, while those missions will scale this up to cosmic volumes,\u201d Scognamiglio said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dark matter\u2014the invisible scaffolding thought to hold galaxies together\u2014is arguably the most elusive substance in the universe. Nearly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[271],"tags":[582,14588,2352,18,19,17,5923,452,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-308342","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-cosmology","10":"tag-dark-matter","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-james-webb-space-telescope","15":"tag-physics","16":"tag-science"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115973904466338163","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}