"Wherever you find normal matter in the Universe today, you also find dark matter. Billions of dark matter particles pass through your body every second. There's no harm, they don't notice us and just keep going. But the whole swirling cloud of dark matter around the Milky Way has enough gravity to hold our entire galaxy together. Without dark matter, the Milky Way would spin itself apart."
"Because dark matter is invisible, the team looked for it by observing how its mass curves space itself, which in turn bends the light travelling to Earth from distant galaxies."
"Dark matter clumped together first, before pulling in normal matter, creating regions where stars and galaxies began to form. By prompting this formation, dark matter also played a role in creating the conditions for planets to form - eventually allowing life to appear."
The James Webb Space Telescope produced a high-precision map of dark matter revealing its distribution and gravitational overlap with normal matter. Dark matter forms a hidden framework that shaped galaxy formation by clumping first and pulling in normal matter to create regions where stars and galaxies formed. The dark matter halo around the Milky Way supplies enough gravity to prevent the galaxy from spinning apart. Mapping used gravitational lensing: dark matter's mass curves space and bends light from distant galaxies, allowing unseen mass to be inferred and located.
Read at Mail Online
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