A team of scientists featuring astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), has recorded the motion of galaxies through huge filaments that knit the cosmic web. The research was carried out with help from scientists from China and Estonia.

The team has found that these long tendrils of galaxies spend millions of light-years spinning. The rotation recorded is believed to be on a never-seen-before scale.

Filaments are cosmic highway

Cosmic filaments are huge bridges made of dark matter and galaxies that connect galaxy clusters. These filaments push galaxies into larger clusters that are placed at the end of filaments. They are described as a type of cosmic superhighway, and scientists have mapped the motion of galaxies in those filaments. The team used the Sloan Digital Sky survey for this study.

It is a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies in the universe. Using Sloan data, the team was able to determine a new property of the filaments. They found that filaments spin.

As per astronomer Peng Wang, despite being cylindrical in shape similar to pencils, the filaments span hundreds of millions of light-years. They are only a few million light-years in diameter.

The massive scale of tendrils

The huge tendrils have such massive scale that the galaxies within them are like specks of dust. They move like a helix or in corkscrew-like orbits around the filament’s center while moving through it. Such spins have never been observed before on such scales, and the implication is that there must be an unknown physical mechanism behind these objects’ torque.

Recently, scientists found that more than 500 new fast-radio bursts (FRBs) that are coming from deep space were received. The discovery was made after a year of research using the CHIME telescope in Canada. It was learned that there are some key differences between FRBs. Some of them were one-off bursts, while some repeated rapidly.