Astronomers have now mapped the cosmic web, the vast structure that holds the universe together, in sharper detail than ever before. The cosmic web is a network of glowing filaments and dark voids made mostly of dark matter and gas. Scientists call it the universe's skeleton.
A team from the University of California, Riverside used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to create the most detailed map ever made. They analyzed approximately 164,000 galaxies in a single region of sky. The map shows the cosmic web's growth across about 13.7 billion years, reaching back nearly to the beginning of cosmic structure, when the universe was only one billion years old.
The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on December 25, 2021, is an infrared observatory that can see much fainter and more distant objects than the older Hubble Space Telescope. This allows it to detect far more galaxies and measure their distances more precisely. In the team's visualizations, bright yellow regions show where galaxies gather in dense clusters and filaments, while dark regions represent the vast empty voids between them.
The lead author, Hossein Hatamnia, is a graduate student at UC Riverside. His advisor, Bahram Mobasher, is a Distinguished Professor at the university. The research involved scientists from countries including the United States, Denmark, Chile, France, Finland, and Japan. The team has publicly released their data so other scientists worldwide can build on their results.