Galaxies are strung along filaments in the vast cosmic web, which also contains enormous voids. Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered an early strand of this structure — a long, narrow filament of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the Big Bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a luminous quasar called J0305-3150. The same team has also probed the properties of eight quasars in the early Universe. They’ve determined that the galaxies’ central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, range in mass from 600 million to 2 billion solar masses.
“I was surprised by how long and how narrow this filament is,” said Dr. Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“I expected to find something, but I didn’t expect such a long, distinctly thin structure.”
“This is one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar,” added Dr. Feige Wang, also from the University of Arizona in Tucson.
The discovery was made as part of the ASPIRE project, whose main goal is to study the cosmic environments of the earliest black holes.
In total, ASPIRE will observe 25 quasars that existed within the first billion years after the Big Bang, a time known as the Epoch of Reionization.
“The last two decades of cosmology research have given us a robust understanding of how the cosmic web forms and evolves,” said Dr. Joseph Hennawi, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“ASPIRE aims to understand how to incorporate the emergence of the earliest massive black holes into our current story of the formation of cosmic structure.”
In their research, the astronomers also analyzed the properties of eight quasars in the early Universe.
They confirmed that the central black holes, which existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, range in mass from 600…
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