An ultra-high-resolution map of mass in the Universe, revealing how dark matter has shaped the growth of galaxies over the past 10 billion years, is published in Nature Astronomy.
The map has more than twice the resolution of its predecessor and extends to earlier periods in the Universe’s evolution, providing a benchmark for tests of the nature of dark matter and models of galaxy environments during the peak period of cosmic star formation, about 8–11 billion years ago.
Diana Scognamiglio and colleagues used imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope to measure the shapes of around 250,000 galaxies and reconstruct the most detailed mass map to date of any contiguous region of the Universe.
The map reveals massive galaxy clusters as well as networks of dark filamentary bridges – which are strands of dark matter, along which gas and galaxies are distributed, forming the skeletal structure of the Universe – and low-mass galaxy groups that are otherwise too faint or too distant to be seen with conventional telescopes.
These structures appear consistent with the leading cosmological model, which predicts that galaxies form at dense nodes between the dark matter filaments that thread or span the Universe.
The authors suggest that these maps will be a valuable resource for studies of galaxy evolution and the growth of cosmic structure.
