Dark matter shown in newest images from James Webb Space Telescope

A new high-resolution map of dark matter, created using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, is offering more clues into the part the mysterious stuff plays in the formation of universe.

The map, published Jan. 26 in the journal Nature Astronomy, is the largest of its kind revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies in the constellation Sextans. It was created with data collected from about 255 hours of Webb telescope observations in January, April and May of 2023, as well as January 2024.

Dark matter is estimated to make up about 27% of the total energy content of the universe, but is hard to detect because it does not absorb, reflect or emit light. (Ordinary matter makes up about 5% while dark energy, a mysterious force accelerating the universe, accounts for the rest.)

Dark matter also passes through regular matter like a ghost. “Billions of dark matter particles pass through your body every second. There’s no harm, they don’t notice us and just keep going," said Richard Massey, one of the study’s coauthors and an astrophysicist with the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, U.K., in a news release about the research.

Researchers analyzed the shapes of about 250,000 distant galaxies to trace how invisible dark matter bends and distorts their light. The effect is subtle – like looking through a slightly warped windowpane – but by combining measurements from so many galaxies, the team was able to reconstruct a detailed map of where dark matter is located, Diana Scognamiglio, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told USA TODAY.

When Webb data detected dark matter, the researchers made the areas blue in the map. “This is the largest dark matter map we’ve made with Webb, and it’s twice as sharp as any dark matter map made by other observatories,” Scognamiglio said in NASA's report of the discovery. “Previously, we were looking at a blurry picture of dark matter. Now we’re seeing the invisible scaffolding of the universe in stunning detail, thanks to Webb’s incredible resolution.”

Dark matter spreads like 'filaments' through universe

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope had been previously used to make a 2007 map of the constellation Sextans region. This newer map, created with the help of Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument, has more than twice the resolution of the previous map and captures activity from about 8–11 billion years ago, according to NASA.

In these newest findings, the researchers found overlapping of dark and regular matter, suggesting dark matter's gravity has pulled at regular matter over the universe's lifetime. That would support scientists' theory that dark matter began to coalesce first, leading to the formation of regular matter and, subsequently, of stars and galaxies, according to NASA.

This sharpest wide-area map of dark matter ever made from space, "shows the invisible scaffolding – clusters and filaments – that guided how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years," Scognamiglio said.

Dark matter pulls in regular matter and, "dark matter collapses under gravity to form this web, and ordinary matter – gas and galaxies – follows along these filaments,” Scognamiglio told Astronomy.com.

Looking at the high-resolution map, “wherever we see a big cluster of thousands of galaxies, we also see an equally massive amount of dark matter in the same place. And when we see a thin string of regular matter connecting two of those clusters, we see a string of dark matter as well,” Massey said. “It’s not just that they have the same shapes. This map shows us that dark matter and regular matter have always been in the same place. They grew up together.”

Without dark matter, "we might not have the elements in our galaxy that allowed life to appear,” said JPL astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, a co-author on this paper and leader on the 2007 map project, in a statement. “Dark matter is not something we encounter in our everyday life on Earth, or even in our solar system, but it has definitely influenced us.”

The new findings, Scognamiglio said, open “a new era of high-resolution dark-matter mapping that … (will be expanded) across much larger areas of the sky" with the help of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an even more powerful space telescope than Webb, which is due to launch as early as fall 2026, and the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope, launched in 2023.

Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at  mikegsnider  &  @mikegsnider.bsky.social  &  @mikesnider & [email protected].