The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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This set of images shows the distribution of the dark matter, obtained from a numerical simulation, at a redshift z~2, or when the Universe was about 3 billion years old.
The left panel displays the continuous distribution of dark matter particles, showing the typical wispy structure of the cosmic web, with a network of sheets and filaments that developed out of tiny fluctuations in the early Universe.
The central panel provides a simplified view of the complex network of dark matter structure according to the so-called halo model, a statistical approach used to describe the distribution of dark matter on both large and small scales. Within this framework, the dark matter distribution is viewed as an ensemble of discrete objects, the dark matter halos, corresponding to the densest knots of the cosmic web.
The right panel highlights the dark matter halos (shown in yellow) that represent the most efficient cosmic sites for the formation of galaxies. Only halos with a mass above a certain threshold can trigger the ignition of intense bursts of star formation, thus creating a starburst galaxy. According to the latest measurements achieved with Herschel, the minimum mass needed by a halo for a starburst galaxy to form within it is 3 x 10^11 times that of the Sun.