Scientists Identify Largest Known Rotating Cosmic Filament with Aligned Galaxy Spins

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Futurism
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Largest rotating cosmic filament discovered by Oxford-led team reveals aligned spin of galaxies and cosmic structure, reshaping understanding of galaxy formation.
Scientists Identify Largest Known Rotating Cosmic Filament with Aligned Galaxy Spins
A What happened
An international team led by the University of Oxford has observed the largest known rotating structure of galaxies using data from the MeerKAT radio telescope. They identified a thin filament of 14 galaxies over 5.5 million light-years, part of a 50 million light-year filament with 280 galaxies. Many galaxies and the filament rotate in the same direction, indicating large cosmic structures influence galaxy spin more strongly and over longer distances than previously thought. The filament's 'dynamically cold' state implies it is relatively young, with gas-rich galaxies still evolving. These findings aid understanding of cosmic flows and galaxy evolution and pave the way for future studies with upcoming observatories like ESA's Euclid and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
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Key insights

  • 1

    Cosmic Filaments as Spin Influencers: The discovery shows that cosmic filaments can impart coherent rotational motion to galaxies within and around them, suggesting a more direct environmental influence on how galaxies acquire their spin than models had anticipated.

  • 2

    Scale of Structural Influence on Galaxy Evolution: Aligned rotations across tens of millions of light-years imply that the large-scale cosmic web's dynamics play a crucial role in the angular momentum distribution among galaxies over extraordinary distances.

  • 3

    Young, Gas-Rich Filament Offers Evolutionary Snapshot: The filament's dynamically cold state and hydrogen richness indicate it is in an early evolutionary stage, providing observational access to processes of star formation fuel accretion and structural growth within the cosmic web.

Takeaways

This detection of the largest rotating cosmic filament enriches our grasp of galaxy formation dynamics and underscores the importance of cosmic environment in shaping galactic properties. Future observatories are poised to deepen this understanding.

Topics

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