Astronomers reveal new details about dark matter’s influence on universe

Amazing stuff! The reported overlap between dark matter and matter might be an artefact or may not represent the whole picture.

"... Dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect, absorb, or even block light, and it passes through regular matter like a ghost. But it does interact with the universe through gravity, something the map shows with a new level of clarity. Evidence for this interaction lies in the degree of overlap between dark matter and regular matter. According to the researchers, Webb’s observations confirm that this close alignment can’t be a coincidence but, rather, is due to dark matter’s gravity pulling regular matter toward it throughout cosmic history. ...

“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,” ...

Found in the constellation Sextans, the area covered by the new map is a section of sky about 2.5 times larger than the full Moon. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ordinary matter—including particles such as protons and neutrons—accounts for only about one-sixth of all matter in the Universe. The rest is dark matter, which does not emit or absorb light but plays a fundamental role in galaxy and structure evolution.

Because it interacts only through gravity, one of the most direct probes is weak gravitational lensing: the deflection of light from distant galaxies by intervening mass. Here we present an extremely detailed, wide-area weak-lensing mass map covering 0.77° × 0.70°, using high-resolution imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the COSMOS-Web survey. By measuring the shapes of 129 galaxies per square arcminute—many independently in the F115W and F150W bands—we achieve an angular resolution of . 

Our map has more than twice the resolution of earlier Hubble Space Telescope maps, revealing how dark and luminous matter co-evolve across filaments, clusters and underdensities. It traces mass features out to z ≈ 2, including the most distant structure at z ≈ 1.1. The sensitivity to high-redshift lensing constrains galaxy environments at the peak of cosmic star formation and sets a high-resolution benchmark for testing theories about the nature of dark matter and the formation of large-scale cosmic structure."

Astronomers reveal new details about dark matter’s influence on universe | University of Cambridge "Scientists using data from the James Webb Space Telescope have made one of the most detailed high-resolution maps of dark matter ever produced. It shows how the invisible, ghostly material overlaps and intertwines with ‘regular’ matter, the stuff that makes up stars, galaxies, and everything we can see."

An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter (no public access)

An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter (preprint, open access)