The cosmic web is a gigantic network of crisscrossing celestial superhighways that connects nearly everything in the universe.
An artist’s impression of the cosmic web. It looks like a vast cobweb-like structure or mostly purple and some orange filaments on a black background. (Image credit: Volker Springel (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics) et al.)
Scientists have made one of the most precise maps of the universe’s matter, and it shows that something may be missing in our best model of the cosmos.
Created by pooling data from two telescopes that observe different types of light, the new map revealed that the universe is less “clumpy” than previous models predicted — a potential sign that the vast cosmic web that connects galaxies is less understood than scientists thought.
