A new map – reached by an international team of astronomers from the United States, China and South Korea – revealed the shape of the universe in the region surrounding our Milky Way, in which galaxies appeared to take the form of intertwined threads together, gathering in more dense points.
cosmic web
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The term “Cosmic Web” is called the shape that groups of galaxies in the universe take, and the gas and dust dwelling in the space between them, where they are not distributed uniformly, but rather take the form of interconnected threads and almost empty spaces of galaxies between them.
At the meeting points of these filaments together we find dense galactic clusters, which contain thousands of galaxies, and in the filaments the numbers of galaxies are greatly reduced.
Artificial intelligence
To build that map, this team used artificial intelligence, where they developed algorithms based on machine learning, and fed it to a huge amount of data about our cosmic surroundings now, in addition to a number of previous simulations of galaxy shapes in the cosmic network.
Then, to make sure the model built by the AI was correct, the researchers applied their results to a popular classification of galaxies called Cosmic Flow-3.
According to the study, this classification contains comprehensive data about the distribution and movement of more than 17 thousand galaxies in the vicinity of the Milky Way, all of which lie within 200 megaparsecs (an astronomical parsec is a unit of measure for distances, where one parsec equals 3.26 light years).
the universe secrets
There is no doubt that building an accurate map of our galactic surroundings will lead to a more accurate understanding of the nature of the most famous cosmic puzzle so far called “dark matter”, which represents 80% of the matter in the entire universe.
Scientists do not know anything about dark matter, but they monitor its apparent gravitational effect on stars at the edge of galaxies and when they measure the clusters of massive galaxies. A group of scientists believes that it has a strong role in shaping the cosmic web to be in that threadlike form.
The researchers in this team believe that they can improve the accuracy of their new map by adding more galaxies, especially when the new data coming from the soon-to-be-launched space telescope “James Webb” is released, which will give us a more accurate understanding of our cosmic ocean, and perhaps one day. Deciphering dark matter codes.