Listening to episode 252 of Science sort of I came across this beautiful discussion of the evidence for dark matter and role it played in the formation of galaxies in the early universe. Here’s an excerpt where Ben Tippet is discussing dark matter in the computer modeling of galaxy evolution:
The galaxies wouldn’t evolve properly or in the correct timescale unless there was dark matter included in the simulations. And so, the modern description for how galaxies formed, in order for them to form in the timescale we see them forming using our telescopes, is if dark matter started out distributed everywhere. Dark matter was the first thing to collapse gravitationally, it formed a filamentary structure, in essence there are long strings of dense distributions of dark matter in the universe.
It collapsed first and then the regular, bosonic matter collapsed around the concentrations of the dark matter. The luminous galaxies we see collapsed around the pre-existing dark matter galaxies. So, there is a tremendous amount of both corroborative and direct evidence that dark matter exists.