"It's an open secret in astronomy that, practically wherever the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) looks in the sky, a vast, clump-filled mist fills its view. But luckily for everyone marveling at JWST's crisp snapshots of faraway galaxies, this dense haze is totally invisible. That lightless, see-through murk is dark matter. Think of dark matter as scaffolding for all the luminous, normal stuff out therewith the former outweighing the latter"
"But scientists have no idea what this glue is made of and have yet to detect it directly; they have only inferred its presence through subtle but unmistakable clues. For something so integral to all we see, it's astonishingly hidden from our cosmic view. Now astronomers have traced dark matter's ghostly contours in the foreground of one of JWST's deep-sky images."
Dark matter is an invisible, lightless substance that outweighs normal matter by about five to one and acts as gravitational scaffolding for galaxies. Its presence is inferred from gravitational effects because it neither emits nor absorbs light and has not been detected directly. JWST images can reveal dark matter indirectly by tracing how rays of light are deflected on their path to the telescope. Astronomers mapped dark matter's contours in the foreground of a deep JWST image of the COSMOS field to produce the most finely detailed dark matter map yet. The map enables studies of how galaxy formation and distribution depend on dark matter's structure.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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