Shedding light on the cosmic skeleton

		IMAGE: Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful... Click here for more information.

"Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe," says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study. "In our cosmic vicinity, stars form in galaxies and galaxies usually form groups and clusters of galaxies. The most widely accepted cosmological theories predict that matter also clumps on a larger scale in the so-called 'cosmic web', in which galaxies, embedded in filaments stretching between voids, create a gigantic wispy structure."