Astronomy and astrophysics
Dim, distant collections of stars trace at the early evolution of the Universe.
The ‘cosmic web’ of fuel spanning a lot of the Universe is illuminated by the faint glow of galaxies billions of parsecs away.
Galaxies are related by fuel filaments, that are interlinked like a colossal spiderweb in house. Until now, astronomers have glimpsed this web in only some spots, the place it’s lit up by ultrabright cosmic beacons generally known as quasars.
But quasars are uncommon, and Roland Bacon at the University of Lyon in France and his colleagues needed to see the web elsewhere. To accomplish that, they used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to stare at a patch of sky in the constellation Fornax.
In this long-exposure picture, they noticed strands of the cosmic web, illuminated not by quasars, however by a sea of small, younger galaxies. These galaxies hail from the distant Universe, representing a time simply two billion years after the Universe was born in the Big Bang.
This new technique of probing the dark cosmic web might yield future insights into the Universe’s early evolution.
