Largest Rotating Structures in Universe Discovered -- Filaments Where Galaxies are "Specks of Dust"
Cosmic filaments are huge bridges of galaxies and dark matter that connect clusters of galaxies to each other. They funnel galaxies towards and into large clusters that sit at their ends. "By mapping the motion of galaxies in these huge cosmic superhighways using the Sloan Digital Sky survey - a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies - we found a remarkable property of these filaments: they spin." says Peng Wang, first author of the now published study and astronomer at the AIP.
"Despite being thin cylinders - similar in dimension to pencils - hundreds of millions of light years long, but just a few million light years in diameter, these fantastic tendrils of matter rotate," adds Noam Libeskind, initiator of the project at the AIP. "On these scales the galaxies within them are themselves just specs of dust. They move on helixes or corkscrew like orbits, circling around the middle of the filament while travelling along it. Such a spin has never been seen before on such enormous scales, and the implication is that there must be an as yet unknown physical mechanism responsible for torquing these objects."
[...] "Motivated by the suggestion from the theorist Dr. Mark Neyrinck that filaments may spin, we examined the observed galaxy distribution, looking for filament rotation," says Noam Libeskind. "It's fantastic to see this confirmation that intergalactic filaments rotate in the real Universe, as well as in computer simulation." By using a sophisticated mapping method, the observed galaxy distribution was segmented into filaments. Each filament was approximated by a cylinder.
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