Like rivers feeding oceans, streams of gas nourish galaxies throughout the cosmos. But these streams, which make up a part of the so-called cosmic web, are very faint and hard to see. While astronomers have known about the cosmic web for decades, and even glimpsed the glow of its filaments around bright cosmic objects called quasars, they have not directly imaged the extended structure in the darkest portions of space—until now.
New results from the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, or KCWI, which was designed by Caltech's Edward C.
In that case, the filament was being lit up by a nearby quasar, the bright nucleus of a young galaxy. But most of the cosmic web lies in the desolate territory between galaxies and is hard to image. This animation reveals a 3D slice through a network of hydrogen gas filaments that crisscross the spaces between galaxies. The data were collected by the Keck Cosmic Web Imager, or KCWI, which was designed to reveal the structure of this previously hidden component of the universe. The region covered in this observation is about 10.5 billion light-years away. The volume depicted here spans an area of 2.3 by 3.2 million light-years and extends across a depth of 600 million light-years .
"We are basically creating a 3D map of the cosmic web," Martin explains."We take spectra for every point in an image at range of wavelengths, and the wavelengths translate to distance."One challenge in detecting the cosmic web is that its dim light can be confused with nearby background light that suffuses the skies above Maunakea, including the glow from the atmosphere, zodiacal light from the solar system , and even our own galaxy's light.
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