Paris, France:
Peering into the early Universe some 12 billion years ago, scientists in France have for the initially time noticed the incandescent filaments of hydrogen gas identified as the “cosmic web,” they mentioned Thursday.
Cosmological models have extended predicted its existence, but till now the cosmic internet had in no way been straight observed and captured in pictures.
Eight months of observation with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and a year of information crunching revealed the filaments as they existed only one to two billion years soon after the Big Bang.
But the greatest surprise, scientists mentioned, was simulations displaying that the light came from billions of previously invisible — and unsuspected — dwarf galaxies spawning trillions of stars.
The findings have been reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“After an initial period of darkness, the Universe erupted with light and produced a huge number of stars,” senior author Roland Bacon, a scientist at the Centre for Astrophysics Research in Lyon, told AFP.
“One of the big questions is what ended that period of darkness,” top to a phase in the early Universe identified as re-ionisation, he mentioned.
Until now, astronomers had only caught partial and indirect glimpses of the cosmic internet by way of quasars, whose highly effective radiation, like vehicle headlights, reveals gas clouds along the line of sight.
But these regions do not represent the entire network of filaments exactly where most galaxies — like our personal — have been born.
Plumbing new depths
“These findings are fundamental,” commented Emanuele Daddi, a researcher at Atomic Energy Commission who did not take portion in the study.
“We have never seen a discharge of gases on this scale, which is essential for understanding how galaxies form.”
The group educated the ESO’s Very Large Telescope — equipped with a 3D spectrograph known as MUSE — at a single area of the sky for more than 140 hours.
Together, the two instruments type one of the most highly effective observation systems in the planet.
The area chosen types portion of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, which consists of the deepest image of the cosmos ever obtained.
But the new pictures plumb new depths of the early Universe — 40 % of the newly found galaxies have been beyond Hubble’s attain.
Although these galaxies — 10 to 12 billion light years away — are as well faint to be detected individually with present instruments, their existence will most likely boost and challenge current models of galaxy formation.
Scientists are only now starting to discover their implications, the researchers mentioned.
Astronomers at the Lagrange Laboratory for the University Cote d’Azur has contributed to the study.