NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Discovers the Earliest Strand in the Cosmic Web That Links Galaxies

Our physical universe is made of matter, energy, and space. It is estimated that there are 200 billion galaxies separated in vast amount of spaces known as the intergalactic space. Despite the immense number of spaces between them, galaxies are not randomly distributed in space. Each of them is part of major concentrations known as cluster. Based on their ages, the star clusters can provide lots of information regarding their host galaxies.

Ancient Filament of Gas and Stars

Just recently, astronomers detected a massive tendril made up of 10 closely packed galaxies which stretch over 3 million light years across. The researchers believe that this ancient filament of gas of stars could be the oldest thread of the cosmic web.

The newly discovered filament was created when the universe was young, about 830 million years after the Big Bang occurred. It is held together at its center by a tremendously bright celestial object with supermassive black hole called quasar. This same black hole is also the reason scientists discovered the presence of the tendril.

Astronomer Xiaohui Fan from the University of Arizona expressed his surprise upon seeing the length and the thickness of the filament. He expected to find something, but he did not expect to encounter a long, distinctly thin filament.

Fan and his colleagues work in the ASPIRE (A Spectroscopic Survey of Biased Halos in the Reionization) project. This project aims to investigate the influence of the earliest black holes in the evolution of galaxies.

The quasar detected in this project is one of the 25 quasars from early universe stage. According to astrophysicist Feige Wang from the University of Arizona, this discovery presents the earliest filamentary structures that people have observed with a distant quasar.

The scientists believe that the black holes played significant role in forming the cosmic web as they serve as gravity wells that draw matter together. On some occasions, the black holes fling it beyond the cosmic winds which stimulate the extremely active quasars. Then the connection of the strands of stars and dust is maintained by gravity even if the wind pulls them across the universe.

What are Galaxy Filaments?

Aside from being grouped into clusters, galaxies are also involved in a vast interconnected filamentary structure that have tremendous barren voids in between. Due to the presence of these massive filaments, astronomers use the name cosmic web to refer to the structure of our universe.

It was cosmologist John Richard Gott who proposed the idea that our universe is like a sponge composed of clusters of galaxies which are meticulously linked by filaments of galaxies. Since then, the cosmic web has been extensively mapped by astronomers.

The cosmic web is made up of galaxy filaments which are considered as the largest known structure in the universe. Galaxy filaments are massive, thread-like patterns which form the boundaries between voids. They are thought to be formed from the hierarchical clustering of galaxies around primordial density fluctuations. Because of this, galaxy filaments do not only provide information about the present-day universe, but they also reveal the processes that took place in its early stage.