Recently, the University of Oxford researchers reported a roughly 50-million-lightyear-long cosmic Filament traced by at least 14 galaxies. The team described it as “one of the largest spinning structures ever identified in the Universe.”
Cosmic or galaxy filaments are the largest ‘threads’ in the universe’s cosmic web. A single cosmic filament is a structure spanning hundreds of millions of lightyears, formed as a result of gravity pulling in gas, dark matter, and galaxies into long, thin strands that link giant clusters of galaxies. Filaments also surround large, empty regions of space called voids.
These cosmic web filaments serve as the nurseries where galaxies grow by accreting pristine gas that fuels their star formation.
Filaments originate where sheets of matter intersect and collapse.They act like cosmic highways along which gas and smaller galaxies ‘flow’ towards big clusters.As material falls in, it can spin up both the filament and the galaxies embedded in it. Because of this, filaments help decide where galaxies form, how fast they grow, and how much fresh gas they receive over billions of years.
Cosmic filaments are enormous thread-like structures made of galaxies, gas, and dark matter.
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