Vast cosmic filament discovered connecting Milky Way to the Universe

Astronomers at The Australian National University have discovered proof of a vast filament of material that connects our Milky Way galaxy to nearby clusters of galaxies, which are similarly interconnected to the rest of the Universe. By examining the positions of globular clusters, they found that the clusters form a narrow plane around the Milky Way rather than being scattered across the sky.

Furthermore, the Milky Way’s entourage of small satellites are seen to inhabit the same plane. This is evidence for the cosmic thread that connects us to the vast expanse of the Universe. The filament of star clusters and small galaxies around the Milky Way is like the umbilical cord that fed our Galaxy during its youth.

A consequence of the Big Bang and the dominance of dark matter is that ordinary matter is driven, like foam on the crest of a wave, into vast interconnected sheets and filaments stretched over enormous cosmic voids – much like the structure of a kitchen sponge. Unlike a sponge, however, gravity draws the material over these interconnecting filaments towards the largest lumps of matter, and the globular clusters and satellite galaxies of the Milky Way trace this cosmic filament.

In the picture, most of these star clusters are the central cores of small galaxies that have been drawn along the filament by gravity. Once these small galaxies got too close the Milky Way the majority of stars were stripped away and added to our galaxy, leaving only their cores. It is thought that the Milky Way has grown to its current size by the consumption of hundreds of such smaller galaxies over cosmic time.