NASA's James Webb Telescope maps dark matter's cosmic web

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have produced a highly detailed map of the dark matter cosmic web. The map reveals how this invisible substance acts as gravitational scaffolding, shaping the formation and distribution of galaxies across a region of the sky equivalent to 2.5 times the size of a full moon.

By analyzing how dark matter bends light from approximately 800,000 galaxies, researchers confirmed that dark matter and visible matter have coexisted since the early universe. The data, collected over 255 hours using the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), provides twice the sharpness of previous observatories and captures ten times more galaxies than earlier efforts. This high-resolution mapping allows scientists to better understand how dark matter filaments guide galactic evolution.