Research jointly led by our astronomers has created the highest resolution map of the dark matter that threads through our Universe.
The map shows the influence of this mysterious and invisible substance on the formation of stars, galaxies and planets.
It tells us more about how dark matter helped pull ordinary matter into galaxies like our Milky Way and planets like Earth.
The map also provides new details about the relationship between dark matter and the normal matter from which we – and everything we can touch or see – are made.
The international scientific team used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The area covered by their new map is a section of sky about 2.5 times larger than the full Moon, in the constellation Sextans.
Webb peered at this region for a total of 255 hours and identified nearly 800,000 galaxies, with many detected for the first time.
The map contains information from about ten times more galaxies than are seen from telescopes on the ground, and twice as many as from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team were able to see in more detail how dark matter interacts with the rest of the Universe through gravity.
Evidence for this interaction lies in the degree of overlap between maps of dark matter and normal matter.
Webb’s observations confirm that this close alignment cannot be a coincidence.
Instead, the astronomers say it is due to dark matter’s gravity pulling normal matter towards it throughout cosmic history – leading to the formation of the Universe we see today.
By revealing dark matter with unprecedented precision, our map shows how an invisible component of the Universe has structured visible matter to the point of enabling the emergence of galaxies, stars, and ultimately, life itself. This map reveals the invisible, but essential role of dark matter, the true architect of the Universe, which gradually organises the structures we observe through our telescopes.”
Read the full research paper in the journal Nature Astronomy.
The study was jointly led by Durham University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA, and the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
More about research co-lead author Dr Gavin Leroy and co-author Professor Richard Massey, in our Department of Physics/Institute for Computational Cosmology.
Our Department of Physics is ranked 88th in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025 and third in the UK in the Complete University Guide 2026.Visit our Physics webpages for more information on our undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
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