Cosmic web

We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter, and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, a group of astronomers now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the 'normal' matter in the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of the universe.

A filament of 10 galaxies seen just 830 million years after the birth of the universe. Woven across our universe is a weblike structure of galaxies called the cosmic web. Galaxies are strung along filaments in this vast web, which also contains enormous voids. Now, astronomers using Webb have disco

It took mankind centuries to map the Earth, and even with all of the indexed knowledge in the world behind it Google can't always figure out exactly where the nearest Pinkberry is. So one might imagine how even with the amazing leaps in technology over past decades, mapping the universe is no small undertaking. But a new technique could allow cosmic cartographers to map 500 times as much of the universal landscape as they have thus far at a fraction of the cost.

Art and science collide in this talk about astronomy, supercomputing, and data visualization by Dr. Benedikt Diemer.

The concept of the cosmic web, viewing the Universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity, is deeply engrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about the most effective construction and the characteristics of the underlying network. Here we explore and visualize the cosmic web as a network.

Strands of gas, dust and stars stretch through the cosmos and embed galaxy clusters, influencing their evolution.

The food-seeking behavior of the simple organism is helping astronomers trace the universe’s vast cosmic web, dark matter and all.

This visualization of the Laniakea supercluster, which represents a collection of more than 100,000... [+] estimated galaxies spanning a volume of over 100 million light-years, shows the distribution of dark matter (shadowy purple) and individual galaxies (bright orange/yellow) together. Despite the relatively recent identification of Laniakea as the supercluster which contains the Milky Way and much more, it's not a gravitationally bound structure and will not hold together as the Universe…

New observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have revealed alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years. The team has also found that the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. (ESO)