Azernews.Az

By Alimat Aliyeva

A new high-resolution map of distant galaxies may help scientists unravel one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that helps hold everything together, Azernews reports, citing foreign media.

The ordinary matter we’re familiar with — stars, planets, and people — makes up only about 5% of the universe. More than a quarter consists of dark matter, while the rest is dark energy, a mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the cosmos.

Dark matter cannot be observed directly because it neither emits nor absorbs light. Instead, scientists study its effects. The gravity of dark matter bends and distorts the light coming from distant galaxies, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. By analyzing these distortions across vast regions of space, researchers can trace where dark matter is located and how it behaves.

The latest map, created using images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, is the most detailed of its kind ever produced over such a large area of sky. Webb identified nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of them observed for the first time, according to NASA. The map has twice the resolution of earlier efforts made with the Hubble Space Telescope and captures galaxies spanning nearly 10 billion years of cosmic history.

“Now we can see everything more clearly,” said study author Diana Scognamiglio of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, the map reveals new galaxy clusters and the vast filaments of dark matter that connect them. Together, these structures form the cosmic web — the underlying skeleton of the universe. Studying this web allows scientists to see how dark matter has clumped and evolved over billions of years.

Dark matter doesn’t affect everyday activities like choosing lunch or going to bed, but it constantly passes through our bodies and has played a crucial role in shaping the universe as we know it.

“Wherever we see a large cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also find an equally massive amount of dark matter,” said astrophysicist Richard Massey, a co-author of the study. “And when we observe thin bridges of normal matter between clusters, we see matching bridges of dark matter as well.”

According to astrophysicist Rutuparna Das of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, understanding dark matter is essential to understanding our own origins.

“Our home is the universe, and we want to understand its true nature,” said Das, who was not involved in the study.

Earlier this month, researchers also announced the discovery of a strange new object known as “Cloud-9” — a starless, gas-rich hydrogen cloud dominated by dark matter. Located about 14 million light-years from Earth, the object is thought to be a remnant of the universe’s early formation and could provide valuable clues about how the first galaxies were born.

Without dark matter, galaxies would not have enough gravity to stay intact — they would slowly drift apart, leaving the universe a much emptier place.