Astronomers using the James Webb Telescope of Nasa have spotted a string of ancient galaxies stretching over 3 million light-years connected by a cosmic filament dating back to the early days of the universe. This ancient filament of gas and stars may represent the oldest known thread of the cosmic web. The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29.
The discovery can shed light on how the universe was formed and also the invisible strings that hold it together. It is anchored by an extremely bright celestial object with a supermassive black hole known as a quasar at its center.
“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is,” Space.com reported quoting Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona and a member of the ASPIRE consortium of researchers who made the discovery.
“I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure,” Xiaohui added.
Over the past 20 years, research has uncovered the universe is built on a sort of scaffolding, a series of filaments and clumps invisible to the naked eye.
In these clumps, dark matter and regular matter become very dense, creating the perfect conditions for the birth of stars and galaxies.
Between these clumps and filaments are “very low-density regions of the universe where there are very few galaxies and less matter,” reported Guardian quoting Niall Jeffrey, a cosmologist at University College London.
While the filament itself is invisible, it’s possible to see how it brings galaxies together. It goes through ten galaxies that appear as tiny red dots on the picture, meaning their light comes from the earliest recesses of the universe.
A quasar, a luminous supermassive black hole, is thought to be anchoring the filament, researchers said.
The team believes that eventually the galaxies will be pulled together into a cluster, much like the nearby Coma galaxy cluster.
The ASPIRE team hopes the picture will shed more light on the cosmic web, but it is also very interested in how early quasars were formed in the universe’s infancy.
“The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves,” said team member Joseph Hennawi of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“ASPIRE aims to understand how to embed the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of cosmic structure formation,” he said.
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Updated: 10 Jul 2023, 11:48 PM IST