At the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an international group of researchers led by Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, presented the map of dark matter on the largest scale ever seen.

This project is called Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey (CFHTLenS) and uses the data from the broader Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS), collected by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope of mount Mauna Kea between 2003 and 2009. The galaxies included in this survey are typically about six billion light years away.

Dark matter is still one of the great scientific mysteries of our days because it’s invisible and interacts weakly with the rest of matter. However, on a cosmic level, gravitational effects have been such as to convince scientists that there must be huge amounts of mass that can’t be detected directly with the instruments so far available.

Project CFHTLenS scientists mapped the distortion called gravitational lensing created by some ten million galaxies. This effect is always higher than it would be expected based on the amount of mass detected by our instruments. The amount of dark matter in a galaxy is estimated from the difference between the distortion that visible matter should create and that actually observed.

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The result of project CFHTLenS shows an intricate cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies. In the past, simulations were performed that showed a distribution of dark matter in a web similar to that actually observed, with concentrations in specific areas and filaments in the rest of space.

Knowing the distribution of dark matter is the first step to understand its nature but it’s a research that brings together the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In fact, the existence of dark matter is theorized because of the distorting effects observed at galactic level but if it actually exists it must be composed of elementary particles of some kind possibly still unknown.

Inevitably, this research will go on for a long time, also because it’s connected to the even more elusive concept of dark energy. It’s estimated that dark matter constitutes about 85% of the matter in the universe but “only” 25% of its matter-energy because of the estimated amount of dark energy.

Once again, experimental science struggles in pursuing its theoretical counterpart because observations and experiments are more and more complex and the budget is what it is – high in absolute terms but a small fraction of the military – yet solving these mysteries would take us even closer to the knowledge of the secrets of the universe.