Galactic filaments are the largest known structures in the universe, hundreds of millions of light years in length. It acts as a bridge between galaxies and dark matter that connects galaxy clusters.
Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, astronomers mapped the movement of galaxies. galaxy in the cosmic thread. In doing so, they discovered that the galactic filament itself was spinning. The amazing fact is that it rotates on a scale of hundreds of millions of light years.
Astronomers have never seen a rotation on such a gigantic scale: the largest rotation on Earth universe.
Noam Libeskind, Project Proponent at AIP, said, “Although the slender cylinder – similar to the dimensions of a pencil – is hundreds of millions of light years in length, but several million light years in diameter, this beautiful tendril of matter is rotating.”
“At this scale, the galaxies within themselves are just dust samples. They move in a spiral or orbit like a helix, rotating around the center of the axis as they move with it. Such a spin had never been seen before on such a large scale. , and the result is certain. There is a hitherto unknown physical mechanism that is responsible for the torsion of these objects.
It remains a mystery how the angular momentum responsible for the rotation is generated in a cosmological context. In the Standard Model of structure formation, the tiny hyperdensities found in the early universe grew by gravitational instability as matter flowed from below into hyperdense regions. Such potential flows are illogical or curlless: there were no primitive rotations in the early universe.
Thus, any rotation likely resulted from the formation of structures, and cosmic webs and filaments, in particular, are subjectively linked to the formation and evolution of galaxies. It also greatly influences the rotation of galaxies, and regularly controls how galaxies operate dark matter Rotate the halo. However, it is not known whether the current understanding of structure formation predicts that the filaments themselves, as non-particle semi-linear objects, should spin.
Noam Libeskind He saidAnd “Motivated by Dr. Mark Neirinc that the filaments might rotate, we examined the distribution of the observed galaxies for the rotation of the filaments. It’s great to see this confirmation that intergalactic filaments are rotating in the real universe, as well as in computer simulations.”
Studies show that, depending on the angle of view and the mass of the endpoint, the filaments in the universe show clear signals consistent with rotation.
The study was carried out by astronomers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP), in collaboration with scientists in China and Estonia.
Journal reference:
- Wang, P., Libeskind, NI, Tempel, E. et al. Possible observational evidence for cosmic filament rotation. Nat Astron (2021). DOI: 10.1038 / s41550-021-01380-6
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