Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a clump of ancient galaxies that may be the oldest strand of the "cosmic web" ever detected.
On a clear night, it might look like the stars above are
distributed more or less evenly.
But that isn't the case — all stars are part of a gigantic cosmic web that links
galaxies across the universe like threads of spider's silk, leaving
unfathomably large swaths of nothingness in between. Now, in two papers published
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29, scientists detail evidence
that this massive cosmic highway stretches back nearly to the
dawn of the universe.
Using
data from the James
Webb Space Telescope, astronomers discovered a
massive, gassy tendril composed of 10 closely packed
galaxies stretching over 3 million light-years. According to the researchers,
this ancient filament of gas and stars may represent the
oldest known thread of the cosmic web.
"I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament
is," Xiaohui
Fan, an astronomer at the
University of Arizona and a member of the research team, said in a statement. "I expected to find something, but I didn't expect such a
long, distinctly thin structure."
The
newly discovered filament formed when the universe was young — a mere 830
million years after the Big Bang. It is anchored by an extremely bright celestial
object with a supermassive black
hole known as
a quasar at its center.
This bright black hole is the reason scientists discovered the
tendril in the first place. Fan and his team are working as part of the ASPIRE
(A Spectroscopic Survey of Biased Halos in the Reionization Era) project, which
aims to study how the earliest black holes influenced galactic evolution. The
quasar detected here was one of 25 early-universe quasars that the project has
its sights set on.
"This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that
people have ever found associated with a distant quasar," Feige
Wang, an astrophysicist at the
University of Arizona and the program's principal investigator, said in the
statement.
The researchers hypothesize that black holes helped to form the
cosmic web by acting as gravity wells to draw matter together, and occasionally
by flinging it far away on "cosmic winds," which whip up around
extremely active quasars. Gravity keeps these strands of stars and dust
connected, even as the winds pull them across the universe.
The researchers think that eventually, the filament will condense into a cluster of galaxies, similar to the Coma Cluster, which lies approximately 330 million light-years from Earth
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