Scientists have confirmed that dark matter exists in small, discrete clumps rather than being smoothly distributed, aligning with current cosmological models.

This groundbreaking discovery was made using a large-scale Earth-sized radio telescope array, which combined observatories like the Green Bank Telescope and European facilities to detect gravitational lensing effects.

Advanced computational methods and gravitational imaging played a crucial role in analyzing the data, revealing a 'pinch' in the Einstein ring that indicated the presence of a dark matter clump.

The detected dark matter object has a mass of about one million suns and is located roughly 10 billion light-years away, observed as it was when the universe was approximately 6.5 billion years old.

Researchers are now aiming to find more such dark matter clumps in different regions to better understand their prevalence and distribution, which could have significant implications for theories about dark matter's fundamental nature.

Led by Dr. Devon Powell, the team identified the smallest dark matter clump ever observed, providing strong support for galaxy formation theories.

These findings bolster the cold dark matter theory, suggesting that dark matter is composed of slow-moving particles that clump together early in the universe's history.