Cosmic web

We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter, and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, a group of astronomers now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the 'normal' matter in the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of the universe.

A filament of 10 galaxies seen just 830 million years after the birth of the universe. Woven across our universe is a weblike structure of galaxies called the cosmic web. Galaxies are strung along filaments in this vast web, which also contains enormous voids. Now, astronomers using Webb have disco

[/caption] One of a number of seemingly implausible features of dark energy is that its density is assumed to be constant over time. So, even though the universe expands over time, dark energy does not become diluted, unlike the rest of the contents of the universe. As the universe expands, it seems that more dark … Continue reading "Astronomy Without A Telescope – Big Rips And Little Rips"

Art and science collide in this talk about astronomy, supercomputing, and data visualization by Dr. Benedikt Diemer.

A new simulation visualizes how distant galaxies might be connected

This visualization of the Laniakea supercluster, which represents a collection of more than 100,000... [+] estimated galaxies spanning a volume of over 100 million light-years, shows the distribution of dark matter (shadowy purple) and individual galaxies (bright orange/yellow) together. Despite the relatively recent identification of Laniakea as the supercluster which contains the Milky Way and much more, it's not a gravitationally bound structure and will not hold together as the Universe…

The cosmic web is part of the universe's large-scale structure. It is composed of dark matter, gas, and galaxies.

New observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have revealed alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe. A European research team has found that the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in a sample of quasars are parallel to each other over distances of billions of light-years. The team has also found that the rotation axes of these quasars tend to be aligned with the vast structures in the cosmic web in which they reside. (ESO)