Mark Thomson is the newly appointed director general of CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory, and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashes particles together at almost the speed of light to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. CERN has been responsible for groundbreaking new physics, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and is a world leader in antimatter research. However, in order to probe even deeper, it must run at higher energy levels. We catch up with Thomson at an important juncture, as the LHC is due to shut down for two years for upgrades, paving the way for even more exciting physics. But is there anything left to discover? And are large particle accelerators the future of particle physics?

“There are really big questions that we don’t know the answer to,” says Thomson. “Big questions like dark matter. Is the Higgs boson a fundamental particle? Does the Higgs boson interact with the dark matter? At some point, we are going to find answers to some of these really, really big questions.”

Read more: The experiments that could finally explain gravity

Deep beneath the planet’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, scientists are waiting for something that may never happen – the interaction of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. This is LUX-ZEPLIN, the most sensitive dark matter detector on Earth.

WIMPs are a leading contender for dark matter and could answer one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: where is the missing matter that makes up the universe? The detector is filled with 10 tonnes of ultra-pure liquid xenon and is so sensitive that even a single gram of dust would skew its results. A single collision could reveal what most of the universe is made of, or prove that decades of physics may be pointing us in the wrong direction.

Scientists have created the best ever map of dark matter using subtle distortions in the shape of about 250,000 galaxies. It could help us understand some of the biggest mysteries in the cosmos.

Dark matter is extraordinarily hard to map because, true to its name, it doesn’t emit any light that we can detect. It only interacts with regular matter through its gravitational pull, so that is what researchers use to figure out where it is. at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and her colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to do so, examining an area of sky slightly bigger than the full moon.

“It is a very high-resolution picture of the scaffolding of this little corner of the universe,” says McCleary. The resolution of the map is about twice as high as previous ones made with the Hubble Space Telescope, and it includes structures much further from Earth.

To make this map, the researchers examined the shapes of about 250,000 galaxies – but it isn’t their intrinsic shape that is interesting. “Those galaxies are basically the cosmic wallpaper,” says at the University of Minnesota, who wasn’t involved in the analysis. Instead, what’s important is how the gravity of dark matter between the telescope and the “wallpaper” warps the light of the galaxies, in a process called gravitational lensing: the further the average shape of the distant galaxies is from circular, the more dark matter lies between them and us.

By analysing these differences in shape, the researchers mapped out huge clusters of galaxies, along with the filaments of the cosmic web that connects them. Some of these structures didn’t match up with anything we had previously seen while observing regular, or luminous, matter, indicating that they must be dominated by dark matter. “To identify many of these structures over a wide field, gravitational lensing is one of very, very few techniques, and definitely the best,” says Williams.

This is important because dark matter makes up about 85 per cent of the total matter in the universe, so it is crucial to the evolution of not only galaxies and galaxy clusters, but also the cosmos as a whole. Building a map of its distribution could help us nail down how it behaves and what exactly it is made of, says Williams.

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“Not only is it an observational coup, but in turn it’s going to enable a lot of other analysis – cosmological parameter constraints, the connection between galaxies and their dark matter haloes and how they grow and evolve over time,” says McCleary. These cosmological parameters include the strength of dark energy, the mysterious force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

For now, it appears that the JWST map matches our current standard model of the universe, known as lambda-CDM, but there are many in-depth investigations of the data yet to be done that are certain to provide new insights, says McCleary. “Although at a glance it’s a match for lambda-CDM, I’m not giving up yet – I’m withholding judgment until our analysis is finished.”