j-j-eys asked: Hey Mr, I've seen you writing a lot stories under some images of galaxies, nebulas and so on. I wanted to ask you, if you could do some research on Filaments and write a story about that or an explanation. I've seen a documentation about Filaments and that our whole universe consists of them, but my mind couldn't get it without any good images and the explanation of them wasn't that good... I would be very happy, as I love to think and imagine just about space!
Hmm. I assume you mean galactic filaments; which are structures into which galaxies are organized. They are the largest known structures in the universe–which makes it difficult to take good photos of them. In this image, for instance, every point of light is an entire galaxy like our own, composed of billions of stars.
It’s not clear why they form. The best theory suggests that they are gravitationally bound by dark matter. Dark matter, and dark energy, are themselves extremely poorly understood. We don’t know what they are, precisely, but rather understand that they exist because they are the only means to account for the structure of the universe on the very largest scales. Among the galactic filaments is the Hercules-Corona Borealis “Great Wall.” Discovered in 2013, it’s by far the largest thing known to exist: it is a group of galaxies three billion parsecs long. That’s 57,520,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.
Incidentally, my next post is a hypothetical visualization of galactic filaments from the Max Planck institute, 1,500 million parsecs across (enough to contain ½ of Hercules-Corona).
Many have pointed out the similarity of the galactic filaments to neurons in the human brain.
While this should not be taken to imply the universe is actually a large human brain, it is not a coincidence but a consequence of how networks form. The internet also assumes this starburst shape;
certain kinds of structures occur at all spatial scales, from the extremely small to the extraordinarily large. Similar patterns emerge in erosion
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