These filaments are thread-like structures that form boundaries between large voids in the universe. Astronomers theorize that moments after the Big Bang, a bulk of the matter in the universe condensed into a web of tangled filaments connected to each other at the locations of massive galaxy clusters.
Matter known as ordinary, which makes up everything we know, corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Approximately half of this percentage still eluded detection. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the 'cosmic web' at temperatures between 100,000 and 10 million degrees. A team led by a researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, observed this phenomenon directly. The research shows that the majority of the missing ordinary matter is found in the form of a very hot gas associated with intergalactic filaments. The article reporting this discovery is published in the journal Nature.
The image above is a digital simulation of the large-scale distribution of matter, with filaments and knots.
