Giant 'thread' of radio emissions found linking galaxy clusters

Scientists predicted that our universe's structure resembles a huge web. We've finally seen one of the strands.
3 MINUTE READ
BY NADIA DRAKE

PUBLISHED JUNE 6, 2019

A billion light-years away, two galaxy clusters are slowly crashing into one another. Now, for the first time, observations have revealed a peculiar ridge of radio waves linking those clusters, like a thread strung between galactic beads.

This radio ridge stretches more than nine million light-years across and traces one of the filaments in the so-called cosmic web, the structure thought to describe the large-scale organization of the universe.

While astronomers have been able to see the myriad galaxies and galaxy clusters that make up the knots in this cosmic net, actually observing the threads between galaxies is not an easy feat. The new image, which shows a stream of plasma between the galaxy clusters Abell 0399 and Abell 0401, is the first known sighting of its kind.

“Radio emission connecting clusters has never been observed before,” says Federica Govoni of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, who reports the observation today in the journal Science. But now that it has, the discovery may help astronomer better understand the universe on its grandest scale.

More:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/06/first-radio-thread-found-linking-galaxy-clusters-cosmic-web-universe/