Researchers have captured in an incredible image one of the cosmic filaments connecting two galaxies from when the universe was just two billion years old.
What makes this image so special is that it is the most detailed ever taken of an ancient strand of the cosmic web.
Cosmic filaments span across millions of light-years and form what’s known as the “cosmic web”. Galaxies are strung together to form massive filaments of the web which funnel gas into galaxies and make them grow.
Additionally, they funnel galaxies into galaxy clusters, which then form the largest structures in the universe.
The cosmic web’s structure doesn’t come out of the blue, in fact it is shaped by dark matter, a mysterious entity that makes up for 85% of all the matter in the universe.
As well as being heavy, dark matter doesn’t interact with light, which makes it hard to detect. It does however, interact with normal, visible matter gravitationally, pulling on it in ways which are visible to us.
Therefore, dark matter dominates normal matter, it holds everything together, gives it structure and shapes the cosmic web’s filaments.
The flow of gas within the filaments can provide some understanding into how galaxies form and evolve but observing the gas within them isn’t easy. This is because even the most abundant element, hydrogen, emits very faint light.
Astronomers from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy and the Max Planck Institute (MPA) in Germany captured the new image.
They used hours of observations from the Multi-Uni Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to capture a highly detailed portrait of a cosmic filament stretching about three million light-years across and connecting two galaxies with supermassive black holes, reports Live Science.
In a statement, lead author David Tornotti, a doctoral student at the University of Milano-Bicocca, shared that the researchers then traced the boundary between the gas in the galaxies and the material in the cosmic web through direct measurements for the first time.
The senstivity of MUSE permitted the team to capture the filament’s light after it had travelled for nearly 12 billion years to reach Eart, the team explained in a study published January 29, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
This clear image has opened up new doors to study gas distributions in cosmic filaments and its impact on the formation of galaxies. Co-author and MPA staff scientist Fabrizio Arrigoni Battaia shared that the team plan to find more filaments in future oberservations in order to get a complete look at how gas flows within the cosmic web.
