Cosmic Chain

Hundreds of galaxies form one of the largest spinning structures ever spotted

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THE FIRST TIME that University of Oxford astronomer Lyla Jung saw the cosmic configuration on her monitor, she almost didn't believe it was real.

But it was and Jung and her colleagues went on to identify one of the largest rotating structures ever found in space: a chain of galaxies embedded in a spinning cosmic filament 400 million lightyears from Earth.

The finding, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, may give astronomers new insights into galaxies' formation, evolution and diversity, Jung says.

Galaxies are not positioned either randomly or uniformly in the universe; instead they are connected in structures called filaments that link them, together with dark matter, across space.

Along with voids-empty spaces that contain very little matter-and groups of hundreds of thousands of galaxies known as clusters, filaments form what astronomers call the cosmic web.