Astronomers have spotted one of the largest rotating structures in the universe
This vast chain of hundreds of galaxies – a cosmic filament – is hurtling through space 400 million light years away
Artist’s interpretation of the newfound spinning filament.
When Oxford University astronomer Lyla Jung first saw the cosmic configuration on her monitor, she almost couldn’t believe it was real. But it was – and Jung and his colleagues identified one of the largest rotating structures ever found in space: a chain of galaxies embedded in a swirling cosmic filament 400 million light-years away from Earth.
Conclusion, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical SocietyJung says, could give astronomers new insights into the formation, evolution and diversity of galaxies.
Galaxies are not located randomly or evenly in the universe; Instead they are linked into structures called filaments that connect them with dark matter throughout space. Together with voids – empty spaces that contain very little matter – and groups of hundreds of thousands of galaxies known as clusters, the filaments form what astronomers call the cosmic web.
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These filaments are the main channels through which matter flows, nourishing galaxies and clusters as the structures expand. “By studying filaments, we gain insight into how large-scale structure forms and how galaxies rotate,” says astrophysicist Peng Wang of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, who was not involved in the new study.
In 2021, Wang and colleagues reported that, based on calculations and satellite imagery, many of the filaments appear to be rotating. The new study takes a closer look at one of these structures. Using data from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which was helping to map cold hydrogen gas in nearby galaxies, Jung’s team found 14 hydrogen-rich galaxies arranged in a thin structure 5.5 million light-years long. That structure was embedded within a 50 million light-year long filament that contained more than 280 galaxies.
The researchers noticed that many of the individual galaxies discovered by MeerKAT were spinning – and, to their surprise, they also found that the entire filament, including the rest of its galaxies, appeared to be rotating with that spin at a speed of about 110 kilometers per second, something astronomers had not seen before. “I began to doubt whether it was real or whether I had done something wrong in the analysis,” says Jung.
Detecting this phenomenon is “extraordinary,” Wang says, because the observational signal is weak, and objects overlapping along the line of sight can muddy the picture without very careful data collection and modeling.
In subsequent analyses, Jung and his team found that the filament was probably still carrying more material. Many of its galaxies appear to be in the early stages of development, she says, because they appear rich in the hydrogen that provides fuel for new stars.
One of the most convincing evidence for the existence of dark matter comes from measurements of the rotation of galaxies. Studying the rotation of the filaments could also reveal how much dark matter they contain, says astronomer Noam Libeskind of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, who was not involved in the study. By revealing what part of the universe exists in these filaments, this study and future studies like it provide “a way to measure the dark matter content of the universe,” Libeskind says.
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