Light on dark matter with weak gravitational lensing

New statistical methods have recently been developed to reconstruct and analyze dark matter mass maps from weak lensing observations. The field of weak lensing is motivated by the observations made in the last decades showing that the visible matter represents only about 4-5% of the Universe, the rest being dark. The Universe is now thought to be mostly composed of an invisible, pressureless matter, potentially a relic from higher energy theories, called "dark matter" (20-21%) and by an even more mysterious term, described in Einstein equations as a vacuum energy density, called "dark energy" (70%). This "dark" Universe is not well described or even understood, so this point could be the next breakthrough in cosmology.