An international project, the Dark Energy Survey, was started in order to find out dark matter present across the universe. The project has come up with its first set of results in the form of an interesting map.

The map shows the concentrations of the dark matter present across the cosmos. The invisible web of dark matter can only be seen through its gravitational influence on visible stars and galaxies. The map has been presented at a conference of the American Physical Society.

Underlining part of the first map is that it has shown areas of dark matter densities in extraordinary detail. The map has also shown visible sky, whose percentage was just 0.4.

Sarah Bridle, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, said that their main aim of carrying out the project is to see the invisible- the dark matter. The map has been made from photos of galaxies in a swathe of Southern Hemisphere sky.

The pictures were clicked from a 570 megapixel camera on a telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. By identifying distortions in the shapes of galaxies present at significant distances, the researchers were able to map the dark matter between those galaxies and earth.

"We measured the barely perceptible distortions in the shapes of about 2 million galaxies to construct these new maps", affirmed lead analyst Vinu Vikran, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Chihway Chang of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich referred to the areas of the map and affirmed that they have been able to identify some massive structures around 100 million light years across.

The name of the project has been kept quite thoughtfully as the eventual goal of the map of dark matter is to allow scientists to predict the strength of dark energy, which is considered to be the reason the universe is expanding at a fast pace.