Scientists using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have unveiled one of the most comprehensive high-resolution visualizations of dark matter to date.
Published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, the results demonstrate a precise overlap between this mysterious substance and the visible matter that constitutes our universe.
"Previously, we were looking at a blurry picture of dark matter. Now we're seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail," said Diana Scognamiglio, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Scognamiglio noted that the map is "the largest dark matter map we've made with Webb, and it's twice as sharp as any dark matter map made by other observatories."
By surveying a specific section of the sky for approximately 255 hours, the telescope identified nearly 800,000 galaxies.
Scientists mapped the dark matter by observing how its mass curves space itself, which bends light traveling to Earth from distant galaxies. The research findings show that "wherever we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also see an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place."
Researchers emphasized that this material's gravity pulled regular matter toward it throughout cosmic history, creating the conditions necessary for planets and life.
"This map provides stronger evidence that without dark matter, we might not have the elements in our galaxy that allowed life to appear," said astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, a coauthor of the paper.
