The universe is in its infancy … a “network” of gas filaments in which galaxies are born

Scientists have achieved an unprecedented picture of what the universe looked like when it first began, around ten billion years ago, and it’s like a network of gas filaments that galaxies were born into, which provides new information about its history.

This giant spider web-like “cosmic web” predicted long ago using the Big Bang model that the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago. The grid is a reservoir of hydrogen gas that provides the fuel needed to make stars whose agglutination leads to the formation of galaxies. It is therefore an essential element to redraw the picture of its evolution. But it is very difficult to observe it, given its distance of 10 to 12 billion light years from Earth, and its low light. However, the instrument “MUSE”, which is a group of 24 spectrometers installed on the “Ferry Large Telescope” of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, reached this observation after an exceptional monitoring campaign, the results of which have been published. Thursday in the magazine “Astronomy and astrophysics”. The international MUSE team focused for more than 140 hours on a single region of the sky, located in the Southern constellation.

After a year of analyzing the data, the scientists were able to capture a three-dimensional image revealing the glow of several hydrogen filaments, spread over a large part of the sky.

Images from this network have become more important than images from the “Hubble” telescope, which has so far provided “the deepest picture of the universe ever obtained,” taken in the same constellation, according to the National Center. of scientific research in a statement.

Through further research, Muse acted like a machine to explore the past, because the further the galaxy was from Earth, the closer it got to the beginning of the universe on a time scale. Thus, the gas filaments appeared as they were one or two billion years “only” after the Big Bang, a stage considered as a preliminary stage in the evolution of the universe.

“After a dark era in its infancy, the universe came back to light and began to produce many stars,” explains Roland Bacon, a researcher at the Center for Research in Astrophysics in Lyon, who led the work.

“One of the big questions is what ended the dark ages,” he added, and this has led to what is called reionization. Thus, the direct observation of the glow of the filaments was very precious in cosmology, because this gas, vestige of the Big Bang, “is the accelerating fuel which made the galaxies grow to become what they are today”, according to Roland Bacon.

As for the researcher at the Atomic Energy Commission, Emmanuel Daddy, who did not participate in the study, he declared: “The result of this study is essential, because we did not attend a rejection of this gas on this scale, which is necessary to understand the process of galaxy formation. “Like most ‘nearby’ galaxies, our Milky Way galaxy cannot provide such information because it is very old and less productive in stars than the young universe was, according to this astrophysicist. 3D image with simulations, the study’s authors concluded that the gas glow came from a hitherto unpredictable group of billions of dwarf galaxies (millions of times smaller than those present today). The hypothesis is that they would have formed a huge number of young stars whose energy “would have illuminated the rest of the universe”.