Giant 'thread' of radio emissions found linking galaxy clusters
Scientists predicted that our universe's structure resembles a huge web. We've finally seen one of the strands.
A billion light-years away, two galaxy clusters are slowly crashing into one another. Now, for the first time, observations have revealed a peculiar ridge of radio waves linking those clusters, like a thread strung between galactic beads.
This radio ridge stretches more than nine million light-years across and traces one of the filaments in the so-called cosmic web, the structure thought to describe the large-scale organization of the universe.
While astronomers have been able to see the myriad galaxies and galaxy clusters that make up the knots in this cosmic net, actually observing the threads between galaxies is not an easy feat. The new image, which shows a stream of plasma between the galaxy clusters Abell 0399 and
