Joanna Thompson is a science journalist and runner based in New York. She holds a B.S. in Zoology and a B.A. in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University, as well as a Master's in Science Journalism from NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Find more of her work in Scientific American, The Daily Beast, Atlas Obscura or Audubon Magazine.
On a clear night, it might look like the stars above are distributed more or less evenly. But that isn't the case — all stars are part of a gigantic cosmic web that links galaxies across the universe like threads of spider's silk, leaving unfathomably large swaths of nothingness in between. Now, in two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on June 29, scientists detail evidence that this massive cosmic highway stretches back nearly to the dawn of the universe.
"I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is," Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and a member of the research team, said in a statement."I expected to find something, but I didn't expect such a long, distinctly thin structure." This bright black hole is the reason scientists discovered the tendril in the first place. Fan and his team are working as part of the ASPIRE project, which aims to study how the earliest black holes influenced galactic evolution. The quasar detected here was one of 25 early-universe quasars that the project has its sights set on.
"This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar," Feige Wang, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona and the program's principal investigator, said in the statement.
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