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An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter

Nature Astronomy (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Ordinary matter—including particles such as protons and neutrons—accounts for only about one-sixth of all matter in the Universe. The rest is dark matter, which does not emit or absorb light but plays a fundamental role in galaxy and structure evolution. Because it interacts only through gravity, one of the most direct probes is weak gravitational lensing: the deflection of light from distant galaxies by intervening mass. Here we present an extremely detailed, wide-area weak-lensing mass map covering 0.77° × 0.70°, using high-resolution imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the COSMOS-Web survey. By measuring the shapes of 129 galaxies per square arcminute—many independently in the F115W and F150W bands—we achieve an angular resolution of \(1.00\pm 0.0{1}^{{\prime} }\). Our map has more than twice the resolution of earlier Hubble Space Telescope maps, revealing how dark and luminous matter co-evolve across filaments, clusters and underdensities. It traces mass features out to z ≈ 2, including the most distant structure at z ≈ 1.1. The sensitivity to high-redshift lensing constrains galaxy environments at the peak of cosmic star formation and sets a high-resolution benchmark for testing theories about the nature of dark matter and the formation of large-scale cosmic structure.

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Fig. 1: Map of cosmic structure, from measurements of weak gravitational lensing with JWST and HST.
Fig. 2: Sensitivity of weak lensing to mass at different cosmic distances, quantified by redshift, z.
Fig. 3: Measured shear distortion of distant galaxies.
Fig. 4: Maps of the weak gravitational lensing convergence from JWST and HST.
Fig. 5: Maps of weak gravitational lensing, X-ray emission and galaxy density in the COSMOS field.

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Data availability

The JWST data (Programme ID: General Observer 1727) are publicly available at https://exchg.calet.org/cosmosweb-public/DR0.5/. The HST data (Programme IDs: General Observer 9822 and 10092) are publicly available at http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/COSMOS/. The XMM-Newton dataset (Programme ID: 020336) is publicly available in staged releases via the IPAC/IRSA website at https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/COSMOS/. The Chandra data (Programme IDs: 901037) are publicly available at https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/COSMOS/gator_docs/cosmos_chandraxid_colDescriptions.html. The weak lensing mass maps are publicly available with this article as Supplementary Data 1–6.

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Acknowledgements

D.S. carried out this research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). Support for this work was provided by NASA grants JWST-GO-01727 and HST-AR15802 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. G.L., R.M. and M.v.W.-K. acknowledge support from STFC via grant ST/X001075/1, and the UK Space Agency via grant ST/W002612/1 and InnovateUK (grant no. TS/Y014693/1). D.H. was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 521107294. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101148925. French COSMOS team members are partly supported by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). O.I. acknowledges the funding of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche for the project iMAGE (grant ANR-22-CE31-0007). G.M. is supported in Durham by STFC via grant ST/X001075/1, and the UK Space Agency via grant ST/X001997/1. S.J. acknowledges the European Union’ Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant no. 101060888, and the Villum Fonden research grants 37440 and 13160. N.E.D. acknowledges support from NSF grants LEAPS-2532703 and AST-2510993. D.B.S. gratefully acknowledges support from NSF Grant 2407752. Z.D.L. acknowledges support from STFC studentship ST/Y509346/1. J.R.W. acknowledges that support for this work was provided by The Brinson Foundation through a Brinson Prize Fellowship grant.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Diana Scognamiglio, Gavin Leroy, David Harvey.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Diana Scognamiglio, Jason Rhodes & Eric Huff

  2. Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Gavin Leroy, Richard Massey, Leo W. H. Fung, Qiuhan He, Zane D. Lentz, Guillaume Mahler & Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta

  3. Laboratoire d’Astrophysique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Observatoire de Sauverny, Versoix, Switzerland

    David Harvey

  4. Department of Astronomy, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Hollis B. Akins

  5. Instituto de Física y Astronomía, Facultad de Ciencias, Valparaíso, Chile

    Malte Brinch

  6. Millennium Nucleus for Galaxies (MINGAL), Valparaíso, Chile

    Malte Brinch

  7. Department of Physics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Edward Berman & Jacqueline McCleary

  8. Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Caitlin M. Casey & Crystal L. Martin

  9. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Caitlin M. Casey & Maximilien Franco

  10. Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN), Copenhagen, Denmark

    Caitlin M. Casey, Shouwen Jin & Marko Shuntov

  11. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Hilo, Hilo, HI, USA

    Nicole E. Drakos

  12. Caltech/IPAC, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Andreas L. Faisst

  13. Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Cité, CEA, CNRS, AIM, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Maximilien Franco & Sandrine Pires

  14. Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Ghassem Gozaliasl

  15. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Ghassem Gozaliasl

  16. Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

    Qiuhan He

  17. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Hossein Hatamnia & Bahram Mobasher

  18. Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Natalie B. Hogg

  19. Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Natalie B. Hogg

  20. Laboratoire univers et particules de Montpellier, CNRS, Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France

    Natalie B. Hogg

  21. Aix Marseille Univ., CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France

    Olivier Ilbert

  22. Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA

    Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe

  23. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Anton M. Koekemoer

  24. DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

    Shouwen Jin

  25. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Erini Lambrides

  26. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Alexie Leauthaud & Brant E. Robertson

  27. Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Daizhong Liu

  28. STAR Institute, Liège, Belgium

    Guillaume Mahler

  29. Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Guillaume Mahler

  30. Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

    Claudia Maraston

  31. School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    James Nightingale

  32. Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Louise Paquereau

  33. Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Paris, France

    Louise Paquereau

  34. Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA

    David B. Sanders

  35. Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Claudia Scarlata

  36. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Marko Shuntov

  37. Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia ‘A. Righi’, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Greta Toni

  38. INAF – Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Greta Toni

  39. Zentrum für Astronomie, Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Greta Toni

  40. MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, MA, USA

    John R. Weaver

  41. Department of Astronomy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    John R. Weaver

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  1. Diana Scognamiglio
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Contributions

D.S. led and coordinated the project. C.M.C. and J.S.K. led the observing proposal. M.F. processed the raw JWST observations, and M.S., O.I., H.B.A., J.R.W. and L.P. produced the photometric catalogues used in this analysis. D.H. measured galaxy shapes. G.L. and D.S. generated the mass maps using a Kaiser–Squires technique enhanced by S.P. D.S. created the galaxy density map with contribution from A.F. G.L. and D.S. identified galaxy clusters. D.S., G.L., D.H., R.M., J.R. and E.H. interpreted the maps. D.S., G.L. and R.M. wrote the first draft of the paper, on which all authors commented.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diana Scognamiglio.

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Nature Astronomy thanks Judit Prat and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information (download PDF )

Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Table 1.

Supplementary Data 1

HST Kappa E map in fits format.

Supplementary Data 2 (download PDF )

HST Kappa E map in pdf format.

Supplementary Data 3

JWST Kappa E map in fits format.

Supplementary Data 4 (download PDF )

JWST Kappa E map in pdf format.

Supplementary Data 5

JWST Kappa B map in fits format.

Supplementary Data 6 (download PDF )

JWST Kappa B map in pdf format.

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Scognamiglio, D., Leroy, G., Harvey, D. et al. An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter. Nat Astron (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02763-9

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