Scientists have published the first detailed map of “dark matter”, said to be the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos. Astronomers believe the matter, never before seen by man, forms more than 80pc of the universe.

The pictures, created using the Hubble space telescope, show dark matter as “an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed”.

It proves the theory, they say, that without dark matter the universe that we see would not be able to exist.

The map was published online by the journal Nature and was produced by a team led by British scientist Richard Massey.

Eric Linder, of the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said: “This is a great step forward.”

The three-dimensional map of dark matter was built up by taking image slices through different regions of space, much like a medical CT scanner builds a 3-D image of the body by taking different X-ray slices in two dimensions.

Dark matter was mapped thanks to a technique first predicted by Albert Einstein called gravitational lensing.