The Cosmic Web

 Order from Chaos - The Cosmic Web

Imagining the universe we have known about would be a picture of innumerous galaxies sprinkled randomly all around like air bubbles suspended in a gel. Chaos. That one word would describe it. However, as we zoom out, in reality, we conceive order from chaos; we would observe that all those galaxies which we envisioned to be spread out randomly are actually existing together along paths of gases. The image is exactly like motor vehicles moving through tarred roads alone, avoiding the land amidst the roads - galaxies are only present along the filaments and these filaments are linked together to form a structure like a spider’s web and we call it the cosmic web, which is a term coined by Richard Bond in 1996 to describe a tangled structure of clumps and filaments naturally formed by dark matter left to experience the pull of gravity. The area enclosed between the roads are analogous to dark matter present as voids among the cosmic web and accounts to nearly 27% of the universe while the actual matter makes up to just 4%.


The Dark Blindfolding Matter

Dark matter is a form of matter which interacts only gravitationally. Consequently, the lack of any other interaction makes this matter invisible, effectively blindfolding our eyes. But this invisible matter is the only entity that could account for the mass density of the universe which is hardly tallied by visible baryonic matter. The critical density and the expansion of our universe suggest the existence of this matter concealed from our sight. Furthermore, the gravitational forces visible matter accounts for are much weaker than the actual strength of gravitational forces on action and dark matter is the one responsible for those gravitational forces.


The End of Greatness

In the beginning, we zoomed out to see the cosmic web. What if we zoomed out further? The universe would then be just a soup of galaxies and scientists call it the End of Greatness.Therefore, cosmic web, the edge of greatness in that sense, is the largest single structure in the visible universe.

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