Hidden Clues on Dark Matter Come into Sight With a New High-Resolution Map of the Sky
Dark matter holds everything together in the entire universe, acting like cosmic glue. Although it plays a crucial role, scientists haven’t even scratched the surface of this mysterious force. Unlike normal matter – from the atoms in us to entire planets in space – dark matter neither emits nor absorbs light, making it invisible. Fortunately, he has a mass; this allows us to roughly estimate dark matter based on its interactions with normal matter.
A new study published in Natural astronomy has revealed the highest resolution map of dark matter to date, making progress in solving one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully captured images revealing dark matter in part of the sky, identifying nearly 800,000 galaxies. The map shows how dark matter distorts the light from these galaxies, providing key clues about its structure and influence.
Learn more: Stars can form in dark matter halos up to 10 times smaller than previously thought
Support the universe
The existence of dark matter was first proposed in 1933 by Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who knew a peculiar process was brewing while he was studying the Coma galaxy cluster (located about 320 million light-years from Earth).
Zwicky found that the galaxies in this cluster were moving at such high speeds that it should have been impossible for visible matter to hold them together. Zwicky suspected there was something else linking these galaxies together, according to NASA.
American astronomer Vera Rubin observed a similar phenomenon in spiral galaxies in the 1970s; The stars at the edges of these galaxies did not move slower than expected, meaning that an invisible force — known as dark matter — was adding mass to the galaxies, according to Carnegie Science.
Since then, scientists have proposed that dark matter is an essential, unifying component of the universe.
“Wherever you find normal matter in the universe today, you also find dark matter. Billions of dark matter particles pass through your body every second,” co-author Richard Massey, a professor at the Institute for Computational Cosmology, said in a statement. “There’s no harm, they don’t notice us and just carry on. But the whole swirling cloud of dark matter around the Milky Way has enough gravity to hold our entire galaxy together. Without dark matter, the Milky Way would break apart on its own.”
Dark matter mapping
Studies of dark matter have attempted to understand how it is distributed throughout the universe. The new map represents a major step forward in achieving this goal.
The map covers part of the sky in the Sextans constellation, which JWST observed for a total of 255 hours. Looking at the map, the researchers observed light coming from galaxies, which was bent by the curved regions of space; these regions themselves were curved by the mass of dark matter.
The map confirms that dark matter and normal matter have had an intimate relationship throughout cosmic history. According to the researchers, clumps of dark matter initially attracted normal matter to create regions where the first stars and galaxies were born. This also paved the way for the formation of planets; in a way, dark matter was necessary for the dawn of life on Earth.
“By revealing dark matter with unprecedented precision, our map shows how an invisible component of the universe structured visible matter to the point of allowing the emergence of galaxies, stars and, ultimately, life itself,” said study co-lead author Gavin Leroy, a researcher at the Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University.
A permanent mystery
The high resolution of the new map allowed researchers to clearly see the gravitational influence of dark matter on normal matter in space.
However, there is still much to discover about dark matter. More information will be revealed with the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which researchers plan to use alongside the European Space Agency’s Euclid Telescope to map dark matter across the universe.
Learn more: Is dark matter real? Most experts say yes, but it’s still hotly debated
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