Home / Science and technology / What is the cosmic web?

What is the cosmic web?

Что такое космическая паутина?

Looking at the night sky, it seems that stars and galaxies are located more or less at random. It is, however, not quite. Despite the randomness, the universe is not a random mess of objects. It may seem surprising, but the Universe has a structure, consisting of massive filaments of galaxies separated by giant voids. Scientists call this the structure of the cosmic web. But why is she so weird? The answer probably lies in the processes that occurred in the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

Что такое космическая паутина?

Before you is a map of the observable Universe. That’s crazy, though, right?

To try to imagine the approximate scale of what is happening, let’s start the countdown from the milky Way galaxy. Our closest galactic neighbors, the Andromeda galaxy and galaxy Triangle. As well as about 50 galaxies in the Local group. Space telescope Hubble is not just pictures of these amazing inhabitants of outer space. However, one should not forget that the universe is expanding, which means that the galaxies fly apart from each other in a variety of aspects. We recently wrote about the fact that in the vastness of space, so many things happen, including the collision of three galaxies together.

Что такое космическая паутина?

Laniakea and the nearest supercluster of galaxies of the Perseus-Pisces look like this

Thus, the space network consists of interconnected strands of grouped galaxies and gas, stretched across the Universe and separated by giant voids. The largest found to date structures is the Great wall of Hercules — Corona Borealis, which has a staggering 10 billion light-years in diameter and contains several billion galaxies. As for the voids, it is the largest void FAC, named after the astronomers Keenan, Barger and Cowie. Diameter KVS is 2 billion light years.

Overall, these features give the Universe a little frothy appearance. However, it is necessary to reduce the magnitude, this pattern disappears and the universe is like a homogeneous piece of galaxies. Astronomers have a great title for this sudden uniformity is the End of Majesty (End of Greatness). On a smaller scale, however, we can see the structure of the Universe. But how did this structure?

It all started with a Big Bang

About 14 billion years ago the Big Bang gave rise to our Universe. In the early universe are incredibly small pairs of particles and antiparticles spontaneously arise and destroy each other. Thus, space itself seemed to be in full swing. Typically, these pairs of particles destroy each other, but the rapid expansion of the early universe prevented it. With the expansion of space, these fluctuations also increased, causing differences in the density of the Universe.

the <code>watch the video below to better understand the true size of the Universe</code>

<code>

</code>

Since matter attracts matter through the force of gravity, these differences explain why matter is “sticky” in some places and not in others. However, this does not fully explain the structure of the cosmic web. In the first 10-30 seconds after the Big Bang, the universe was full of plasma primary, stuck together due to the aforementioned differences. When this material was heavy, it created pressure that counteracted gravity, creating ripples, like the sound wave. Physicists call these ripples baryon acoustic oscillations. Simply put, this ripple is the product of normal matter and dark matter. As you know, dark matter is the most mysterious structure in the Universe. Overall, these and many other processes such as the interaction between ordinary and dark matter has generated a cosmic web, which is a structure of the Universe.

Of course, there are many other processes that have an impact on the space web, but about this we will tell you another time. In the end, from that described above may be a little dizzy. No matter how hard we try, we not in forces to realize a similar scale of the Universe. At the same time, understanding where we are, after all, it may help to look at the world a little differently.

 

Check Also

Science in Russia is isolated, as the Runet

Science in Russia is isolated, as the Runet: the staff of universities are already ordered …