Astronomers take first photo of 'cosmic web' spanning two galaxies

Astronomers have photographed a unique thread in the cosmic web that connects two galaxies that existed when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. Both galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes.

The cosmic network stretches for an incredible 3 million light years, making it about 30 times longer than the Milky Way. This is a huge framework on which the structure of the visible Universe is formed, Space.com writes.

"By capturing the faint light emitted by a cosmic filament that traveled just under 12 billion years to reach Earth, we were able to accurately characterize its shape," said team leader and researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Davide Tornotti.

"For the first time, we have been able to trace the boundary between the gas contained in galaxies and the material contained in the cosmic web using direct measurements," the researcher added.

According to scientists, the lines of the web are made up of dark matter, the most mysterious "substance" in the universe, which does not interact with light and is therefore virtually invisible.

The gas that flows along these lines, like traffic on a cosmic highway, does interact with light, but it is still difficult to image, experts say. When the gas that exists between stars is released, it is done indirectly through the light it absorbs from bright background sources.

The team of researchers overcame these difficulties with the help of MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer), a second-generation Very Large Telescope (VLT) instrument at the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

However, even with this sophisticated instrument, the study of this cosmic web required hundreds of hours of observations, experts say.

The scientists also turned to supercomputer simulations of the universe conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) to calculate the emissions that should be seen from the filamentary gas based on the standard model of cosmology, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model.

The observation of the cosmic web and its correspondence to the predictions of the standard model of cosmology reveals new facets of the Universe to scientists, but they are eager to find even more lines of the cosmic web in future studies.

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