We’ve known for a while about the large-scale structure of the Universe. Galaxies reside in filaments hundreds of millions of light-years long, on a backbone of dark matter. And, where those filaments meet, there are galaxy clusters. Between them are massive voids, where galaxies are sparse. Now a team of astronomers in Germany and their colleagues in China and Estonia have made an intriguing discovery.
These massive filaments are rotating, and this kind of rotation on such a massive scale has never been seen before.
Obviously, there’s no way to take an actual picture of the Universe’s large-scale structure. But there are some almost-famous images that come from the
Millennium Simulation Program. The Millennium Simulation was a super-computer simulation of a cubic portion of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on each side. The image contains about 20 million individual galaxies organized in filaments and clumps, and it was our first real glimpse of the Universe’s LSS.
It’s remarkable to look at that image now and imagine those filaments rotating.
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