Nearly one year ago, the COSMOS-Web research team released the largest view ever of the universe. Now, thanks again to the COSMOS-Web program and the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have released the most detailed map ever of the cosmic web, showing more detail on the density of galaxies in the universe.
The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework — a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.
In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers present a reconstruction of galaxies and how they form a network across 13.7 billion years of cosmic history.
Jeyhan Kartaltepe, professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, is a co-author of the paper and co-leader of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), of which COSMOS-Web is a subset. COSMOS-Web was the largest General Observer program selected by JWST and has continually advanced our understanding of the universe.
“One of the major goals of the COSMOS-Web survey is to take advantage of JWST’s remarkable sensitivity and resolution to trace the evolution of structure over the age of the universe,” said Kartaltepe. “The data have enabled just that – an exquisite three-dimensional view of our universe from a few million years after the Big Bang to today.”
This new view of the universe shows that large-scale structure drives galaxy evolution by enhancing early mass assembly in dense regions and increasingly suppressing star formation in low-mass systems at later times. It provides the cleanest and most reliable reconstruction of the large-scale structure of the universe.
In addition to the current paper and the initial publication of the COSMOS-Web data set, the team has also released one of the most detailed, high-resolution maps of dark matter ever produced.
Along with Kartaltepe, RIT researchers Santosh Harish, Ali Ahmad Khostovan, and Lilian Wang were co-authors on the paper. The lead author was Hossein Hatamnia, a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside. The research team spans numerous institutions across the U.S. as well as individuals from Denmark, Chile, France, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, China, Germany, and Italy.