By Nadia Drake
AUSTIN, Texas — Astronomers might not know what dark matter is or be able to see it, but at least they know something about where it is. Using telltale distortions in light from distant galaxies, scientists have mapped out clumps and strings of the invisible stuff on a larger scale than ever before.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/15363.jpg?resize=300%2C222&ssl=1)
One set of maps, presented January 9 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, comes from five years of observations made by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii. The work covers an area of sky roughly one billion light years across that’s populated by more than 10 million distant galaxies. Most of the galaxies lie six billion light years from Earth, providing the team with an enormous swath of space to study.
“The dark matter map coming out of this survey has a tremendous cosmological volume,” said Rachel Mandelbaum of Princeton University and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research.