The Cosmic Web : Mystery behind Galactic patterns across the Universe

What force drives galaxies and star clusters to emerge in patterns? 

**Cosmic Web of the Universe**  

Our universe isn't such a mess after all. The cosmic web, which we like to call it, is exactly like it sounds: a web-like structure that interconnects every galaxy and star cluster in the universe, which are light years apart from each other. We can actually imagine it as a cosmic map, which gives the location of all the galactic and star clusters in the region. 

Stars, galaxies, star gases and a lot of empty space - all make up this giant cosmic network, a network of which we're all part of.

But how did these galactic structures manage to align themselves in this pattern? Does it have to do something with the Big Bang? Or is it one of those strange effects of gravity? Moreover, why does the cosmic web reveal brighter and denser regions of the universe while in some regions, it's utterly dark and empty? 

Formation of the Cosmic Web

Cosmic Web

At the initial stages of the Big Bang, when the universe was too hot and dense for atoms to even exist, the distribution of matter seemed pretty much uniform throughout. Since our universe was filled with tiny particles in random motion, they often annihilated with their particle pair, which created a density fluctuation in space-time (known as the Casimir Effect). 

Initially, the differences in the densities of different regions were too tiny to be noticed. But as the universe expanded rapidly, these irregularities in the densities expanded along with it and clumped up the matter in specific regions, once it became stable for ordinary matter to exist. Gradually, gases (mainly hydrogen) clumped up in large groups and the first young stars were born, followed by the formation of galaxies and galactic clusters.

As the universe expanded, these high-density regions grew into enormous galactic clusters, from which branches, known as galactic filaments further emerged as smaller celestial structures. 

Dark matter, which is known to reside largely in between galaxies in clusters, is the main factor in driving gases to clump together under its force of gravity. Now, as for the empty space, the void will keep on increasing as long as the universe expands.  

It was not until 2019, that we got a clear picture of the structure of the universe and what the cosmic web looks like on a broader scale. 

 

A deep understanding of the structure of the cosmic web helps to solve the mysteries regarding the formation of large galaxies and supermassive black holes at their centers that date back to the early universe. 

One thing that we're most certain of is that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and as time goes on, it'd be harder and harder to even explore our local galaxy, let alone the deep space!!