Webb telescope discovers early strand of cosmic web - 10 galaxies gathered in vast interconnected threads

Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have made a remarkable discovery - they have identified a thread-like arrangement of 10 galaxies dating back to just 830 million years after the big bang. This 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a very distant and luminous quasar - a galaxy with an active, supermassive black hole at its core.

The researchers believe that this filament will eventually evolve into a massive cluster of galaxies, similar to the well-known Coma Cluster in the nearby universe.

This groundbreaking observation is part of the ASPIRE project (A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era) aimed at studying the cosmic environments surrounding the earliest black holes. The project will observe a total of 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years after the big bang, during a period known as the Epoch of Reionization.

"This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar," said Feige Wang of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the principal investigator of this program.

The researchers also examined the properties of eight quasars in the young universe and confirmed that the central black holes in these quasars, which existed less than a billion years after the big bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion times the mass of our Sun.

Astronomers are still seeking evidence to explain how these black holes grew so rapidly and attained such immense sizes.

"These unprecedented observations are providing important clues about how black holes are assembled. We have learned that these black holes are situated in massive young galaxies that provide the reservoir of fuel for their growth," said Jinyi Yang of the University of Arizona, who is leading the study of black holes with ASPIRE.

Webb's observations have provided compelling evidence of how early supermassive black holes potentially influence the formation of stars within their galaxies. While these enigmatic objects accrete matter, they also generate powerful outflows of material, which extend far beyond the black holes themselves, affecting the galactic scale. These winds can significantly impact star formation.

"Strong winds from black holes can suppress the formation of stars in the host galaxy. Such winds have been observed in the nearby universe but have never been directly observed in the Epoch of Reionization," said Yang. 

Cosmic Webb, meet cosmic web 🤝Galaxies gather in clusters and threads stretching across the universe, punctuated by vast voids. Now Webb has discovered an early strand of this cosmic web — 10 galaxies that existed 830 million years after the big bang: https://t.co/cUuZMDgZ7J pic.twitter.com/VTsur9JaiT

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) June 29, 2023