A single glowing thread stretching 13 million light years, made up of at least 20 galaxies strung together like beads on a string, shouldn't have been possible this early in the universe's life. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope found exactly that structure anyway, nicknamed the Cosmic Vine, tucked inside a patch of sky called the Extended Groth Strip, between the constellations Ursa Major and Boötes.
The galaxies sit at a redshift of about 3.44, meaning the light captured left them when the universe was only around 2 billion years old, less than 15 percent of its current age. Despite the universe still being in its relative infancy, the Vine curves through space in a distinct bow shape spanning roughly 650,000 light years wide, more than six times the width of our own Milky Way, with a combined mass equivalent to around 260 billion suns.
A team led by postdoctoral researcher Shuowen Jin at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Denmark identified the structure while sifting through Webb's infrared data specifically searching for very distant, very early galaxies. What makes the Vine stand out isn't just its size but its coherence, the galaxies appear gravitationally bound together along a filament of dark matter, essentially the scaffolding cosmologists have long predicted underlies the universe's large scale structure, but rarely caught this cleanly formed so soon after the Big Bang.
Some galaxies within the chain are still bursting with active star formation, while others appear to have already exhausted much of their star forming gas, likely the result of violent galactic mergers roughly half a billion years before this snapshot was captured. Researchers say the Vine's unusually large size for its age challenges assumptions about how quickly massive cosmic structures could actually assemble, adding it to a growing list of surprisingly large early structures Webb keeps turning up.
Does it change how you picture the early universe, knowing structures this massive and organized were already forming just 2 billion years after everything began?
Source: Cosmic Dawn Center, Live Science, Space dot com
