NASA Reveals New Details About Dark Matter’s Influence on Universe

James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:

NASA Reveals New Details About Dark Matter’s Influence on Universe

If it’s invisible, how do you map it and why does it *matter*?

Using Webb data, researchers mapped locations of dark matter (shown in blue) across a field of nearly 800,000 galaxies. This area of the sky is about 2.5 times larger than the full Moon, located in the constellation Sextans.

We can’t see dark matter. It doesn’t emit, reflect, absorb, or block light. How can we tell it's there? The answer is gravity. Dark matter, like everything with mass, has gravity, and we can see the effect it has on space, and light traveling through space. If we observe how and where light is being warped by gravity, we can make a map of the matter warping it, even if that matter is invisible to us.

The Webb data show how dark matter overlaps and intertwines with regular matter; it’s the invisible scaffolding of the universe. When we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, there is an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place.

So why does dark matter matter? Dark matter has actually shaped the universe. As the early universe evolved, scientists think dark matter started clumping together first, eventually pulling regular matter together, prompting galaxy and star formation to begin earlier than they might have otherwise. All this created the conditions for planets to eventually form. It was in the first generation of stars that the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were made, and through star death that those elements were dispersed. Dark matter provided more time for complex planets to form and gave us the elements for life to appear on Earth.

Scientists will use the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for wider field mapping of dark matter, and a next generation telescope concept like the Habitable Worlds Observatory will help with more detailed views.

Credit: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale/A. Pagan

Read more: www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa-reveals-new-details-about...

Image description: Image of nearly 800,000 galaxies appearing as points of white in varying sizes overlaid with a map of dark matter, shown in varying opacities of light blue.

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.