An international team of astrophysicists has produced the most detailed map yet of the so-called cosmic web, the vast structure made up of filaments of dark matter and galaxies that forms the backbone of the universe. The result was published in The Astrophysical Journal by a team led by the University of California, Riverside, with researchers from the Department of Physics and Astronomy “Augusto Righi” (DIFA) at the University of Bologna also taking part.
Caption for the image above: The vertex indicates the present, and each galaxy is placed at its distance in time, up to when the universe was less than one billion years old (source: Hossein Hatamnia, UC Riverside)
The new map was made possible by data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the COSMOS-Web project, the largest observing programme ever devoted by the telescope to the study of cosmic evolution. Thanks to it, astronomers were able to observe much fainter and more distant galaxies than ever before, producing an unprecedented three-dimensional reconstruction of the cosmic web in terms of detail and depth.
The distribution of more than 164,000 galaxies was mapped across almost 14 billion years of cosmic history, observing structures formed when the universe was less than one billion years old.
"The COSMOS-Web observing programme allows us to combine JWST’s resolving power and sensitivity with an observing area large enough to study large-scale distribution in the universe. Thanks to JWST, we can now study in detail how galaxies evolve, also in relation to the environment in which they live and their position in the cosmic web," explains Greta Toni, who recently defended her PhD thesis in Astrophysics at the University of Bologna.
"The cosmic web represents the universe’s large-scale structure: a weave of dark matter and gas filaments linking galaxies and galaxy clusters, separated by vast, nearly empty regions. Understanding how this network formed and evolved over time is one of the central goals of modern cosmology, because it can provide important constraints on cosmological models, the nature of dark matter and the formation of cosmic structures," says Lauro Moscardini, Professor of Cosmology at the University of Bologna.
