For the first time, French physicists have seen several filaments of the interstellar network simultaneously. The world's most sophisticated optical telescope was used to observe the newly discovered structures.
An image of some two billion years after the Big Bang in the constellation Fornax (Oven). Each point of light is an entire galaxy. The blue silk of the cosmic web was discovered with MUSE. The gas extends over a distance of 15 million light-years. That's roughly equivalent to 150 times our Milky Way placed back to back.
The presence of filaments - the gas in which galaxies shape - has long been expected by cosmological models. However, no photographs of the phenomena were captured, except in quasars' vicinity, astronomical objects of high luminosity in some galaxies' centers.
The observations required an unprecedented 140 hours of observations of a single small region in the sky using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument.
Researchers published their study, "The Muse Extremely Deep Field: The Cosmic Web in Emission at High Redshift," in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Not Every Galaxy and Universe Are The Same
The cosmos was just 1.3 billion years old when the farthest filaments were discovered. The nearest match happened 800 million years back. The universe was at a crossroads at the time when galaxies were producing stars and rising at breakneck speed.
This bold campaign's target region is now well-known. It belongs to Hubble's Ultra Deep Sector. Between late 2003 and early 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope observed the area. It has been refined several times since then, and it remains the most accurate picture of the universe ever taken. The recent findings greatly build on it.
Previously, astronomers estimated that some 10,000 galaxies could be seen in this area of the sky. The number is just going to climb. The figure is 40 percent higher in the areas of the Ultra Deep Field analyzed by the researchers. Not just that, but there's more. There are probably a lot of galaxies out there that we can't see.
Roland Bacon, the study lead author, told CNN that the distribution of galaxies in the sky and the universe is not the same. Bacon, an astrophysicist and researcher at the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon in France revealed that galaxies were created by gas at the beginning of the universe.
"Gas, mostly hydrogen, is the fuel which forms stars, and in the end forms the galaxy," he explained. "The galaxies will form in these very long filaments of gas."
How Astronomers Discovered The First Image
The researchers used a simulation to find out what is lighting the interstellar web's gas filaments. Since the gas in these intergalactic relations is highly diffused, something could be lighting it so we can see it.
The team got a response from the simulation. There are a colossal number of galaxies in that area. According to the results, these filaments are illuminated by a swarm of billions of dwarf galaxies. We can't see them because they're so thin and faint.
Co-author Joop Schaye from Leiden Observatory said in a statement that the light we're seeing is mostly emanating from young galaxies with millions of times fewer stars than our own Milky Way.
Those tiny galaxies, Schaye said, were most likely responsible for the conclusion of the interstellar 'dark ages.' He added that the universe was darkened and heated by the first generations of stars fewer than a billion years since the Big Bang.
This discovery would undoubtedly spark a heated debate in the region. A diffuse interstellar ultraviolet background created by young stars in galaxies is the most common theory for the cause of the illumination. This will allow the filaments to shimmer by heating them. More observations, however, would be needed to comprehend the secrets of the interstellar web completely.
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