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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope are examining one of the largest structures in the universe as part of a quest to understand the violent lives of galaxies. Hubble is providing evidence of unseen dark matter tugging on galaxies in the crowded, rough-and-tumble environment of a massive supercluster of hundreds of galaxies. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe’s mass. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has mapped the invisible dark matter scaffolding superclusters as well as the detailed structure of individual galaxies embedded in it.

The dark matter map was constructed by measuring the distorted shapes of over 60,000 faraway galaxies. To reach Earth, the galaxies’ light traveled through the dark matter that surrounds the supercluster galaxies and was bent by the massive gravitational field. Heymans used the observed, subtle distortion of the galaxies’ shapes to reconstruct the dark matter distribution in the supercluster using a method called weak gravitational lensing. The dark matter map is 2.5 times sharper than a previous ground-based survey of the supercluster.

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