Thanks to technology and scientific advancements regarding the universe, we have been able to change our perception of humanity. We have gone from thinking we are the center of the universe to discovering that everything is connected by a cosmic web that distributes galaxies throughout the universe. This cosmic web is responsible for the origin of all galaxies and serves as the connection between them.
In this article we are going to tell you what the cosmic web is, what its characteristics are and how it connects all the galaxies in the universe.
What is the cosmic web
The cosmic web is a web-like structure that essentially connects the entire universe. It began to form shortly after the Big Bang, and the first galaxies were formed from it.
The cosmic web consists of filaments of hydrogen and dark matter. This web connects all elements of the universe through these same filaments. Galaxies are created at the points where these filaments intersect.
This is a somewhat complicated concept to imagine. To be able to graph this, one has to think in a general framework, and this is what cosmologists study, the dynamics of the universe. The organization of this structure seems to follow a hierarchical model, down to the scale of superclusters and filaments. It is the largest structure from which we can understand the universe.
In short, if we were to imagine a map of the universe, it would be the cosmic web . The image below gives you an idea of ​​what the parent structure from which the first galaxies formed looked like. This is the best view so far of the large-scale structure of our universe.
As you can see?
This is a team of scientists from around the world using two fundamental technologies: the Long-Range Telescope (VLT) and the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Multiple Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE).
With these two tools, scientists were able to see the light from the gas that forms the filaments of the cosmic web. They had to look at a region of the sky that was deeper than before.
They managed to capture the deepest image ever captured. Before that, the record was held by Hubble, the so-called Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). This is an image emitted about 13 billion years ago, just 800 million years after the Big Bang.
New images now obtained show the light from the gas emitted by the filaments of the structure; in other words, we are seeing a group of galaxies forming in the past. It's as if we were discovering a childhood portrait of the universe a thousand years before its birth.
The universe is now about 13.800 billion years old. That is, the light of this network of universes is the past of the universe, and it is the birth of the entire galaxy.
Cosmic web and gravity
For years, cosmologists have been developing computer simulations of the structure of the universe to create a "standard model of cosmology." To do this, they used as a starting point the cosmic microwave background radiation, corresponding to observations of the early visible universe collected by instruments such as the Planck Space Observatory.
His calculations showed that as the universe grew and formed, matter was pulled together by gravity into filaments and nodes, like a giant cosmic web. The new results from the 10-m Keck Telescope in Hawaii are the result of a joint effort by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. They constitute the first direct observations of the cold gas that adorns such cosmic webs.
The network proposed by the Standard Model is composed primarily of mysterious "dark matter." Although invisible on its own, this elusive substance exerts a gravitational pull on visible light and nearby ordinary matter.
Huge clumps of dark matter bend light passing near them through a process called gravitational lensing, which has previously made it possible to measure their distribution. But very distant dark matter is hard to see this way, and ordinary cold matter is hard to detect.
In these new observations, the glowing hydrogen illuminated by the distant quasar outlines a hidden filament of dark matter being drawn toward it by gravity. This is how the filaments that make up the cosmic web are detected.
Dark matter is expected to dominate mass and form these structures, and then ordinary matter, gas, stars, and everything else, will shape the filaments and structures defined by dark matter dynamics. The scientists detected the filaments earlier thanks to the use of gravitational lensing that allows them to see the distribution of dark matter.
How is it formed?
Galaxies are not randomly scattered, but rather tend to clump into larger structures due to the influence of gravity. On a very large scale, these aggregations take the form of filaments that intersect at nodes, thus creating the cosmic web.
The cosmic web is formed thanks to the influence of dark matter and dark energy, which, as we have seen, are two essential components of the universe, although most of them cannot be directly observed. Dark matter, which neither emits nor reflects light, exerts a significant gravitational force, acting as "scaffolding" to guide the distribution of visible matter, such as stars and galaxies.
The filaments of the cosmic web are streams of dark matter and gas, around which normal matter clumps due to gravity. In these regions, galaxies find the ideal conditions to form and evolve. The nodes of the cosmic web are points where multiple filaments intersect, and it is at these nodes that large amounts of matter concentrate, forming massive clusters of galaxies.
This network-like structure is crucial to understanding how the universe is organized on a large scale and how its different components interact. The cosmic web acts as a kind of skeleton that connects all the galaxies, providing gravitational communication pathways along their filaments.
I hope that with this information you can learn more about what the cosmic web is and how all the galaxies are connected.