Last week, scientists at
Caltech publicized that they’d found direct indication of the intergalactic
medium (IGM) made up of “dim matter,” the pale, light mix of hot gas filaments
(marbled, maybe, with undetectable dark matter) that links all galaxies
together. And it’s tough to overstate the significance of this discovery, in
terms of scale; we’ve discovered the cosmic web, the bones of the cosmos. This simulation from the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Advanced Visualization
Laboratory (AVL) demonstrates how galaxies form in the spinning, cloudy cosmic
web:
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| Image Credit: Christopher Martin, Robert Hurt |
The discovery of the gas
filaments that make up the cosmic web has caused a relatively tame media reaction
because scientists have long doubted its existence, and reporters don’t tend to
have much to say about undisputed findings that approve what was already doubted—but
depending on what it tells us, it may eventually turn out to be one of the most
important scientific discoveries of the century. From viewing at this cosmic
web, we can simply see that the galaxies that we think of as inaccessible lumps
of matter moving helplessly in the deeply massive open void of dark, soundless
space are actually touching each other—clinging, in a sense, to each other—as
the universe stays to inflate.
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