A few years ago astronomers used the massive 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope (VLT) with the MUSE camera to look at the same spot in the sky Hubble observed to create the the Ultra-Deep Field, an area of the sky about the same size as a grain of sand held at arm's length… but in which Hubble saw over 10,000 galaxies.Įxtremely distant hydrogen gas (blue) forms filaments that galaxies were born from in the very early Universe. What astronomers needed was a map of this material in typical spots in the Universe, representative of the cosmos as a whole.Īnd that's what they now have.
![cosmic web wallpaper cosmic web wallpaper](https://image.freepik.com/free-vector/realistic-cosmic-galaxy-background-concept-space-nebula-cosmos_269299-356.jpg)
Again, it's a very localized detection in a special location. Some of that gas has also been seen glowing (what we say is i n emission), but only near where bright galaxies are lighting it up. But that only shows you where that gas is in an extremely narrow spot on the sky, and even if you do this with hundreds of quasars the map you get is literally spotty. As the quasar light passes through that primordial hydrogen gas, some of the light is absorbed in characteristics ways, and we can see that absorption in the quasar light. Quasars, intensely bright galaxies blasting out radiation as their central supermassive black holes gobble down matter, can be used to find them, for example. There's been some success in detecting them, though. They'd be loaded with hydrogen gas and glowing, but this all happened so long ago that it has taken over 13 billion years for the light from them to reach us. The problem is seeing this original structure, the original filaments that formed the cosmic web. But that was enough to create all the structure we see in the Universe today. These over- and under-dense regions were incredibly small a typical denser spot might be 1 part in 100,000 more dense than its neighbor. Some places had a teeny bit more matter in them than others.
![cosmic web wallpaper cosmic web wallpaper](https://magdadesignart.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/a.jpg)
#COSMIC WEB WALLPAPER FULL#
It was crammed full of energy and matter, and the distribution wasn't smooth. In many ways it was like an explosion, though an explosion of space, not in space: It was the creation of space itself. The Universe formed about 13.8 billion years in a sudden and colossal burst of expanding space and energy. But what they found in their images was the very framework of the Universe. This material is so far away and so incredibly faint that it took one of the largest telescopes in the world coupled with one of the most powerful cameras to see it at all. For the first time, astronomers have obtained large-scale images of the cosmic web - the incredibly ancient scaffolding of dark matter and hydrogen gas out of which galaxies in the Universe were formed.