A gas filament with a length of 50 million light years –unfathomably large thread-like structures of hot gas that surround and connect galaxies and galaxy clusters–has been observed by astronomers at the University of Bonn for the first time Its structure is uncannily similar to the predictions of recent computer simulations.
“A Tiny Aberration”
We owe our existence to a tiny aberration, reports the University of Bonn. Over the course of 13 billion years, since the Big Bang, “a kind of sponge structure developed: large ‘holes. without any matter, with areas in between where thousands of galaxies are gathered in a small space, so-called galaxy clusters, that should still be connected by remnant filaments of the primordial gas, like the gossamer-thin threads of a spider web.