#cosmic web

Revealing the cosmic web: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will map millions of galaxies and find bubble-like voids, some as small as just 20 million light-years across. Roman’s vast trove of data will give scientists a greater understanding of how cosmic voids are sculpted by dark energy and gravity.

JWST Spots a Young Cosmic Web

Astronomers from the University of Arizona think they have found a string of galaxies in the early universe that is the youngest example of lined up galaxies, or galaxies that are showing up the vast cosmic web that binds together the universe.

The reason this is important is, it is suspected that these strands and filaments are showing the dark matter that is underlying, an unseen part of the universe that we can detect through it's actions, and not by any of the traditional techniques used for baryonic matter.

The entire structure is 3 million light years long, and anchored by a Quasar.

Source :

"Astronomers have discovered a huge filament of hot gas bridging four galaxy clusters. At 10 times as massive as our galaxy, the thread could contain some of the Universe’s ‘missing’ matter, addressing a decades-long mystery."

(Simulation of the cosmic web- credit)

"Over one-third of the ‘normal’ matter in the local Universe – the visible stuff making up stars, planets, galaxies, life – is missing. It hasn’t yet been seen, but it’s needed to make our models of the cosmos work properly.

Said models suggest that this elusive matter might exist in long strings of gas, or filaments, bridging the densest pockets of space. While we’ve spotted filaments before, it’s tricky to make out their properties; they’re typically faint, making it difficult to isolate their light from that of any galaxies, black holes, and other objects lying nearby.

New research is now one of the first to do just this, finding and accurately characterising a single filament of hot gas stretching between four clusters of galaxies in the nearby Universe.

As well as revealing a huge and previously unseen thread of matter running through the nearby cosmos, the finding shows how some of the densest and most extreme structures in the Universe – galaxy clusters – are connected over colossal distances.

It also sheds light on the very nature of the ‘cosmic web’, the vast, invisible cobweb of filaments that underpins the structure of everything we see around us."

Our cosmic neighborhood may be 10x larger

A team of international researchers guided by astronomers at University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy is challenging our understanding of the universe with groundbreaking findings that suggest our cosmic neighborhood may be far larger than previously thought. The Cosmicflows team has been studying the movements of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of attraction.

A decade ago, the team concluded that our galaxy, the Milky Way, resides within a massive basin of attraction called Laniākea, stretching 500 million light-years across. However, new data suggests that this understanding may only scratch the surface. There is now a 60% probability that we are part of an even grander structure, potentially 10 times larger in volume, centered on the Shapley concentration—a region packed with an immense amount of mass and gravitational pull. The findings were recently published in Nature Astronomy. 

“Our universe is like a giant web, with galaxies lying along filaments and clustering at nodes where gravitational forces pull them together,” said UH Astronomer R. Brent Tully, one of the study’s lead researchers. “Just as water flows within watersheds, galaxies flow within cosmic basins of attraction. The discovery of these larger basins could fundamentally change our understanding of cosmic structure.”

Vast cosmos

The universe’s origins date back 13 billion years when tiny differences in density began to shape the cosmos, growing under the influence of gravity into the vast structures we see today. But if our galaxy is part of a basin of attraction much larger than Laniākea, which means immense heaven in the Hawaiian language, it would suggest that the initial seeds of cosmic structure grew far beyond current models.

“This discovery presents a challenge: our cosmic surveys may not yet be large enough to map the full extent of these immense basins,” said UH astronomer and co-author Ehsan Kourkchi. “We are still gazing through giant eyes, but even these eyes may not be big enough to capture the full picture of our universe.”

Gravitational forces 

The researchers evaluate these large-scale structures by examining their impact on the motions of galaxies. A galaxy between two such structures will be caught in a gravitational tug-of-war in which the balance of the gravitational forces from the surrounding large-scale structures determines the galaxy’s motion. By mapping the velocities of galaxies throughout our local universe, the team is able to define the region of space where each supercluster dominates.

The researchers are set to continue their quest to map the largest structures of the cosmos, driven by the possibility that our place in the universe is part of a far more expansive and interconnected system than ever imagined.

TOP IMAGE: Galaxy motions converge into colored basins of attraction. The Milky Way is shown as the red dot. Credit University of Hawaiʻi

cosmic

sorry i took so long to answer, i was considering this one very seriously for a few days

this comes from a moment when i was watching How the Universe Works (highly recommend) and Dr Michelle Thaller said that there is a huge web of galaxies in the universe that astronomers call the cosmic web

it was such a starry eye moment for me. knowing that all of our galaxies are strewn together in a web-like structure. jaw dropping stuff

also thanks for the ask you're one of the first people to ever give me an ask since i abandoned my Voltron specialty

“The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has capped off the first seven months of its survey run by smashing through all previous records for three-dimensional galaxy surveys, creating the largest and most detailed map of the universe ever. Yet it’s only about 10% of the way through its five-year mission. Once completed, that phenomenally detailed 3D map will yield a better understanding of dark energy, and thereby give physicists and astronomers a better understanding of the past – and future – of the universe. Meanwhile, the impressive technical performance and literally cosmic achievements of the survey thus far are helping scientists reveal the secrets of the most powerful sources of light in the universe.”