Astronomy and astronomy
Dim, distant clusters of stars mark the Earth’s early evolution.
The ‘cosmic web’ of gas that spans much of the Universe is illuminated by the glow of galaxies billions of parsecs away.
Galaxies are connected by gas filaments, which are interconnected as a colossal spider in space. So far, astronomers have only seen this net in a few places, where it is lit up by ultrabright cosmic lanterns called quasars.
But quasars are very rare, and Roland Bacon at the University of Lyon in France and his colleagues wanted to see the net elsewhere. To do this, they used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe an orbit in the constellation Fornax.
In this long image, they saw strands of the cosmic web, illuminated not by quasars, but by a sea of small, young galaxies. These galaxies come from the distant Universe, representing a time just two billion years after the Earth was born in the Big Bang.
This new way of studying the cosmic dark web could provide insight into the early evolution of the Earth.