The enigma of dark matter, the strange material that dominates the universe but which is invisible to telescopes, has for the first time been given physical characteristics and its "temperature" measured.

Researchers from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, have been able to place limits on how dark matter is arranged in space, the BBC News portal reported.

The Cambridge team, in its detailed study of 12 dwarf galaxies that skirt the edge of our Milky Way, have been able to establish that the galaxies contain about 400 times the amount of dark matter as they do normal matter.

Using the biggest telescopes in the world, including the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile, the group has made detailed 3D maps of the galaxies, using the movement of their stars to "trace" the impression of the dark matter among them and weigh it very precisely.

"It's the first clue of what this stuff might be," Gerry Gilmore, a researcher, was quoted as saying. "For the first time ever, we're actually dealing with its physics."

Scientists have a good idea about "baryonic matter" - the "normal" matter that makes up the stars, planets and people, but it has struggled to comprehend the main material from which the cosmos is constructed.

Astronomers cannot detect dark matter directly because it emits no light or radiation.

Its presence can be inferred from the way galaxies rotate: their stars move so fast they would fly apart if they were not being held together by the gravitational attraction of some unseen material.

Such observations have established that dark matter makes up more than 95 percent of all the mass in the universe.

The Cambridge study revealed that the dark matter particles move at a speed of about 9 km per second -- a surprise, since the current theory had predicted it to be barely a few millimetres per second.

"These are the first properties other than existence that we've been able determine," Gilmore said.

Future research in particle accelerators may yield more clues. Scientists believe these are relic particles produced in the Big Bang.

The Cambridge team expects to submit the first of its results to a leading astrophysics journal in the next few weeks.