A team from the international Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration believes their findings support the theory that about just four percent of the present composition of the universe is ordinary matter.
The rest, the team says, is made up of substances that remain ‘dark’, largely un-knowable and in many cases simply theoretical.
The research backed scientific hypothesis that 26 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious cold dark matter, and the bulk - a whopping 70 percent - is "in the form of an elusive dark energy."
Our knowledge of both is extremely limited but Dark Energy is believed to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
And the continued expansion seem to provide concrete evidence that the universe will ultimately suffer a ‘heat death’ where energy is exhausted and what is left behind is very cold and very dead.
This image of the NGC 1398 galaxy was taken with the Dark Energy Camera.
Cold dark matter is theorised to be a non-luminous material which exists is comprised of weakly interacting particles.
When it is made of high-energy randomly moving particles, created soon after the Big Bang, it is described as hot dark matter.
Meanwhile, dark energy is a theoretical form of energy thought to permeate space, accelerating the expansion of the universe at an increased rate.
David Bacon of the University of Portsmouth said: "Dark matter is invisible to us, but we can see its effects - its gravity is bending the light from distant galaxies, so they look distorted to us. We can work back from measuring the distortions to mapping the cause. It's so exciting to see this truly vast map of the dark Universe at last.”
The team said for the first time, scientists can see the structure of the current universe in contrast to the universe at its very beginning – and therefore can answer many questions about how it evolved.
Joe Zuntz, of the University of Edinburgh, who worked on the analysis, said: "The DES measurements support the simplest version of the dark matter/dark energy theory.
“This is a huge part of the picture showing how the cosmos has evolved over the last 14 billion years. It’s the dark Universe made visible on an unprecedented scale.”
Surprisingly, it is easier to measure the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe in the distant past than it is to measure it today.
In the first 400,000 years following the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a glowing gas, the light from which survives to this day.
The European Space Agency’s orbiting Planck observatory created a map of this cosmic microwave background radiation, giving us a snapshot of the universe at that very early time.
Since then, the gravity of dark matter has pulled mass together over time, while dark energy has been pushing matter apart. Using the Planck map as a start, cosmologists can calculate precisely how dynamic plays out as the Universe evolves over 14 billion years.
Dark matter is invisible to us, but we can see its effects - its gravity is bending the light from distant galaxies, so they look distorted to us.
Ofer Lahav of UCL, chair of the DES:UK Consortium and chair of the DES Advisory Board, said: “It is remarkable that dark energy, proposed in its simplest form by Einstein 100 years ago, is now measured so accurately by DES. However, the nature of dark energy is still a big mystery.
“This result is the culmination of 13 years of dedicated work.”
The primary instrument for DES is the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope in Chile, one of the most powerful cameras in existence, able to capture digital images of light from galaxies eight billion light years from Earth.
The new DES results draw from data collected during the DES first year, which covers over 1,300 square degrees of the sky, equivalent to the area covered by about 6,600 full moons.
DES scientists used two methods to measure dark matter. First, they created maps of galaxy locations to trace its density, and second, they precisely measured the shapes of 26 million galaxies to directly map the patterns of its gravity over billions of light years, using a technique called gravitational lensing.
To make these ultra-precise measurements, the DES team developed new ways to detect the tiny lensing distortions of galaxy images, an effect not even visible to the eye, enabling revolutionary advances in understanding these cosmic signals.
In the process, they created the largest guide to spotting dark matter in the cosmos ever drawn using galaxy distortions.
Jack Elvin-Poole, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, who led work building the catalogue of galaxies used in the analysis, said: "The size of these maps and the amount of data going into them makes them incredibly powerful.
"Bringing maps of galaxies and dark matter together gives us a whole new way to understand how the dark side of the Universe behaves."
These results and others from the first year of the Dark Energy Survey will be released today online at