MOSCOW, JANUARY 26. . Cosmologists have used images from the James Webb Space Telescope to compile the most detailed map of the distribution of dark matter across the observable Universe, with twice the resolution of analogues prepared with Hubble. This was reported by the press service of Durham University, UK.
“This is by far the largest map of dark matter that we have compiled with the help of Webb. Previously, we saw a rather dim picture of the distribution of dark matter throughout the Universe, while now we see” the underside of the universe “with an amazing level of detail,” said researcher Diana Scognamiglio of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA), who was quoted by the Durham University press service.
Cosmologists believe that the Universe has a structure similar to a giant three-dimensional network. Its filaments, also called filaments, are formed by the accumulation of dark matter. At the intersections of these filaments, dense clumps of visible matter in the form of galaxies and clusters of them cluster. Astronomers hope that observing the nodes of this network will help reveal the mechanism of galaxy development, as well as the formation of the entire structure of the universe.
Scientists have compiled the most detailed map yet of one of the large patches of this “network,” which covers almost the second largest area of the night sky than the Full Moon. To map the distribution of visible and dark matter in this region of space, located in the constellations Sextant and Leo, the orbiting James Webb Telescope observed it continuously for more than 255 hours, allowing it to see even the faintest and most distant galaxies.
In total, Webb discovered nearly 800 thousand galaxies in this region of space, twice as many as could be found with Hubble and ten times more than using ground-based telescopes. Studying the shapes of 250 thousand of these galaxies and revealing their gravitational interactions with surrounding clusters of matter allowed scientists to double the resolution of the map of dark matter, uncovering its previously unknown clusters and the filaments of the “cosmic web” that connect them.
According to scientists, the structure, size and other properties of these filaments generally correspond to predictions of widely accepted cosmological models, allowing for the existence of “cold” dark matter, whose particles weakly interact with visible matter and radiation. Scientists hope that further observations using Webb and the WFIRST (Nancy Grace Roman) space observatory under construction will expand this map and supplement it with objects located at greater distances from Earth.
