How does the Cosmic Web connect Taylor Swift and the last line of your “heavenly address”?

A new map of the “Cosmic Web” that formed the Universe shows points of gravitational pull in the local universe, called “gravity pools”, in previously unseen detail.

Created using information from the Cosmicflows-4 dataset, the new map identifies gravitational basins, or “gravity wells,” where gravity dominates, and brings galaxies together in more detail than ever before. The map also offered a surprise about our home galaxy. By measuring the speed and motion of 56,000 galaxies, the study found that our cosmic home, the Milky Way, is likely part of a 1,000 million light-year-wide gravitational basin called the Shapley Basin, which lies within the gravitational basin of the Laniakea Supercluster. dragged towards.

These basins of attraction are vital to the completion of our “cosmic address”, which begins with the Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Virgo Cluster, the Virgo Supercluster, Laniakea and the Shapley Basin, but has no final line. This final address on the cosmic shell is the hypothetical largest structure in the Universe, which scientists call “The End of Greatness.”

“The overarching structure of the Universe is the Cosmic Web, which you can think of as a spider web or a fishing net in 3D,” Daniel Pomarede, a cosmic map maker or “cosmographer” at the University of Paris-Saclay, told Space. com. “On this structure surrounding the nodes of the web are superimposed pools of attraction, their boundaries pass through the voids located around the nodes, and these boundaries are crossed by the threads of dark matter connecting the two nodes.”

Connected: How do galaxies grow once they get into the cosmic web of the Universe?

Of course, there are more colorful analogies than an outrageous postal address. In a tweet on his X channel, the cosmic cartographer compared a newly created map of the local universe and its pools of gravity to the outfit Swift wore to the iHeartRadio Wango Tango concert in Carson, California on June 1, 2019, referring to the singer-songwriter as “cosmological” icon”.

Taylor Swift as a source of attraction in the local universe pic.twitter.com/0HpeLEFBseOctober 4, 2024

Don’t let this slightly frivolous comparison fool you; Exploring these vast regions of space by Pomared and his team is serious business. That’s because, as part of the Cosmic Web, these gravitational pools can reveal how galaxies like the Milky Way came together into larger clusters and thus how the 13.8-billion-year-old Universe formed.

Your new “space address”

Pomared must know everything about the cosmological superstar. In 2014, he was one of the discoverers of the Laniakea supercluster, which confirmed the concept of gravity pools. Laniakea’s discovery was made as part of a study known as Cosmic Streams 2, which at the time consisted of the largest catalog of galaxy movements in history.

This project mapped the speeds of galaxies as they move away from each other at speeds proportional to their relative distance, almost as if they were caught in a flow caused by the expansion of the Universe, which astronomers call the “Hubble Flow.”

“When we obtained our first maps using the Cosmicflows-2 catalog, a three-dimensional region appeared within which cosmic flows converge towards the Great Attractor, near the Centauri galaxy cluster, in the direction of our galaxy,” Pomared said. “In addition, the cosmic flow converges to other, separate, neighboring attractors. This well-defined volume is 500 million light years in size, and we called it the attraction basin and gave it the name Laniakea.”

Subsequent maps revealed the existence of two other massive cosmic structures: the aforementioned Shapley Attraction Basin and the Sloane Great Wall Attraction Basin. Now, thanks to Cosmic Currents 4, Laniakea seems to be drawn to Shapley.

Pools of Attraction in the Local Universe – YouTube

If the rapid inflation of space 13.8 billion years ago during the Big Bang had occurred uniformly throughout the cosmos, it would have resulted in a completely smooth or “uniform” Universe.

“The universe was born homogeneous and isotropic, having the same average properties everywhere and in all directions,” Pomared explained. “However, in the first fractions of a second, during the so-called “inflation phase,” the tiny quantum fluctuations in the field that cause inflation created randomly distributed fluctuations in the density field.”

These quantum density fluctuations were dissipated and amplified by the rapid expansion of the Universe. As a result, some regions became slightly more densely populated at the expense of other regions which became less dense.

“Matter flows from low-density regions to high-density regions, gravitational pools, and empty regions become cosmic voids,” Pomared said. “Cosmic flows follow threads that converge at the nodes of the Cosmic Web, where we find large accumulations of matter, where clusters of galaxies form, hence the basins of attraction.”

Multi-colored irregular shape with piercing dark veins.

Cosmic map of the largest structures of the local universe, the so-called basins of attraction to which matter is attracted. (Image credit: A. Valade et al./Nature Astronomy courtesy of D. Pomared)

The result is a large-scale Universe, divided into nodes of the Cosmic Web containing thousands of galaxies, as well as voids containing little matter, and a smaller number of galaxies with cosmic flows transferring matter from the first to the second. So, although they may have started out small, these density fluctuations were vital because without them the Universe would be uniform and smooth, perhaps without clumps of matter such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Therefore, just as the flows of mighty rivers carved out geological features on Earth such as the Grand Canyon, cosmic flows carved out structures such as galaxies, galaxy clusters and superclusters.

“The associated velocities of galaxies are called ‘peculiar velocities’ and can be thought of as deviations from Hubble’s law, and we call these motions cosmic flows,” he continued. “What’s interesting is that these peculiar velocities contain valuable information: they tell us what impacts galaxies are exposed to; for example, if they are located next to a massive structure, their velocity vector will point towards that structure. Our maps are obtained using this method. information.”

Light blue web structure with orange and red splashes.

A massive galaxy cluster from the C-EAGLE simulation, providing a view of an area comparable to where the filaments were discovered. As these filaments converge, a massive cluster of galaxies gathers. (Image credit: Joshua Borrow using C-EAGLE)

The creator of space maps explained that with the discovery of gravity pools, a new way to map the Universe has emerged, allowing scientists to segment space into neighboring cells and determine their boundaries.

“It’s quite interesting, but what’s most amazing is that with this mapping technique we can map areas of the universe that are usually hidden from us because they are hidden by our own galaxy, the Milky Way,” Pomared said. “If there are structures hidden in these regions, they influence the galaxies in our astronomical catalogs; therefore, we can map them.”

This approach is already bringing surprises. The team was shocked when they accidentally discovered a spherical shell with a diameter of 1 billion light years in the Cosmicflows-4 galaxy distribution map. They suggest that this shell, which they call “Hooleilana”, could be a remnant of an individual quantum fluctuation in the early Universe.

purple smoke containing a brown smoky bubble with a red center

An image of a 1 billion light-year wide bubble of galaxies called Hooleilana. (Image credit: Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio; Daniel Pomarede, IRFU, CEA University Paris-Saclay.)

In search of the “end of greatness”

The importance of these attraction pools is matched only by their staggering size. For comparison, our home galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide, and the distance to our closest galaxy, Andromeda, is about 2 million light-years. Laniakea, on the other hand, is a staggering 500 million light-years wide, and within it is a mass equivalent to 100,000,000,000,000,000 suns!

The team has now discovered that Laniakea is moving toward the Shapley Basin, which is about twice its size and 1,000 million light-years wide.

“Through this analysis, we found that there is a 40% chance that the Milky Way belongs to the Laniakea gravitational basin and a 60% chance that it belongs to the Shapley gravitational basin,” Pomared said. “In addition to the question of our home attraction basin, we provided a map of numerous other attraction basins, 15 of which have a greater than 50% probability of existence.”

Amazingly, the Great Wall of Sloan is believed to be even larger than these other two comic book network nodes, spanning a staggering 1.37 billion light years. This shows that even larger structures remain to be mapped, including the largest structure possible, The End of Greatness.

The illustration shows a galaxy entangled in a cosmic web.

The illustration shows a galaxy gaining mass at the center of the cosmic web. (Image credit: Robert Lee (created using canva))

The team double-improved the Cosmicflows-2 catalog, which maps 8,000 galaxies. In 2016, Cosmicflows-3 was based on a flow of 18,000 galaxies, and now, in 2024, the Cosmicflows-4 catalog details 56,000 galaxies. The ultimate goal of the project is to find the ultimate universal structure and the final line of each cosmic address.

Pomared explained that the team wants to know whether the observed size of the End of Greatness is compatible with the Standard Model of cosmology. Gravity pools provide a new perspective on this question and also help identify the largest structure in the local universe to which we belong.

“On the other side of the cosmic distance scale, consider the size of the observable universe: a radius of 48 billion light years. You can fit a hell of a lot of attraction pools inside it,” Pomared continued. “We continue to expand the map of the Universe! The dominant gravitational basins identified here—Shapley, Hercules, Sloan Great Wall, and South Pole Wall—were limited to the edges of our data. Current data is not deep enough to determine the outer boundaries of these dominant gravitational basins, meaning they could very well be much larger!

“In this study, we concluded that we have not reached the end of greatness.”

Pomared explained the next steps in the ongoing search for the End of Greatness. Ironically, this will involve focusing on the small details of these huge structures.

“We would like to look at specific issues. For example, the cosmography of the attraction basin of the Sloan Great Wall,” Pomared concluded. “We have not provided any details about the contents of this structure. We just know it’s connected to this 1.4 billion light-year long thread called the Great Sloan Wall, discovered in 2005. There are many projects in the long term. to get more distinctive speeds and expand our data.”

The study, based on Cosmicflows-4, was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

How does the Cosmic Web connect Taylor Swift and the last line of your “heavenly address”?

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