Cosmological models have long predicted the existence of filaments – gas in which galaxies are created – but no images of the phenomenon have been captured, except in the vicinity of quasars, which are astronomical objects with high brightness that are at the centers of some galaxies are found. .
The cosmic web is the building block of the cosmos – which consists mainly of dark matter and covered with gas – on which galaxies are built.
Using the MUSE instrument, scientists studied a region in the sky for about 140 hours, studying the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field for about 140 hours. The area is the place where the deepest images of the cosmos have ever been obtained.
“The galaxies in the sky and the universe are not spread everywhere,” author Roland Bacon, an astrophysicist and researcher at the Center de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon in France, told CNN.
“Star systems in the early days of the universe were formed by gas. Gas, mostly hydrogen, is the fuel that forms stars and ultimately forms the galaxy,” he explained. “The galaxies will form in these very long filaments of gas.”
There was indirect evidence that there was gas in the region, Bacon said. When the team studied quasars, they sometimes found that the light was obscured, which they said was due to the presence of gas.
The team’s analysis of the images captured with the telescope revealed light from the hydrogen filaments.
“The best explanation is that the light we see from the images is not due to the ultraviolet background – it comes from billions of tiny galaxies that form stars, called dwarf systems,” Bacon said.
Our large galaxy, the Milky Way, is orbited by more than 50 other, smaller galaxies, including dwarf systems.
While the Milky Way now houses between 200 and 400 billion stars, dwarf systems contain between 100 million and a few billion.
Dwarf galaxies fused in the early universe to form the larger galaxies it contains today, including the Milky Way.
“We can not see these galaxies because they are intrinsically faint and too far away: we observe them two billion years after the big bang – at a distance of 11 billion light-years. But there is so much that we can see the integrated light that produced by them, ‘he said.