The universe is unfathomably vast, but it’s not just empty space. There’s a superstructure spreading throughout it, composed of immense dark matter filaments and sheets spanning hundreds of light-years. Now, astronomers have published the most detailed map of this cosmic web ever constructed in the The Astrophysical Journal.
An international team of astrophysicists accomplished the feat using high-resolution observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)—much more detailed than the Hubble Space Telescope can manage—which allowed them to peer back in time to the universe’s infancy. The JWST is both sensitive enough to detect the faint infrared light from far away galaxies and measure the distances to them more accurately, permitting researchers to construct this new map.
“The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST,” study author Bahram Mobasher of the University of California, Riverside said in a statement. “What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before, are now clearly visible.”
Read more: “Star Siblings Tell Tales of Galactic Chaos”
The magnitude of the universe can be difficult to grasp, but researchers say this level of unprecedented detail will help them understand how its intricate architecture evolved over time.
Lead image: ChompopsonG / Adobe
