EARTH.COM - For years, maps of how matter is arranged across the universe came with a built-in compromise. Individual galaxies showed up fine.
The filaments and clusters they formed – the bigger architecture – remained smeared at the edges.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is changing that. Its largest survey has produced the most detailed map of that architecture ever created. What it finds in the early universe doesn’t quite match the older, blurrier versions.
Mapping the cosmic web
The cosmic web is the underlying architecture of the universe – a skeleton of filaments and sheets of gas and invisible matter, with immense empty voids in between. That invisible matter provides the gravity that holds the threads together despite emitting no light.
Galaxies and clusters sit along those filaments, threaded into one connected structure. Where threads cross, galaxies pile up. Where they thin out, almost nothing exists at all.
Astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have now produced the most detailed map of that structure ever made.