вЂњWe used the same methods to find the filaments that Yahoo and Google use for image recognition, like recognizing the names of street signs or finding cats in photographs.вЂќ вЂњUsually researchers donвЂ™t study these filaments directly вЂ“ they look at galaxies in observations,вЂќ said Shirley Ho, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and Cooper-Siegel associate professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University who led the study. More studies of these filaments could provide new insights about dark energy, another mystery of the universe that drives its accelerating expansion.ДЇilament properties could also put gravity theories to the test, including EinsteinвЂ™s theory of general relativity, and lend important clues to help solve an apparent mismatch in the amount of visible matter predicted to exist in the universe вЂ“ the вЂњmissing baryon problem.вЂќ Published April 9 in the journal Nature Astronomy, the detailed exploration of filaments will help researchers to better understand the formation and evolution of the cosmic web вЂ“В the large-scale structure of matter in the universe вЂ“В including the mysterious, unseen stuff known as dark matter that makes up about 85 percent of the total mass of the universe.Дark matter constitutes the filaments вЂ“ which researchers learned typically stretch and bend across hundreds of millions of light years вЂ“ and the so-called halos that host clusters of galaxies are fed by the universal network of filaments. They also used models and theories about the filaments to help guide and interpret their analysis. The international science team, which included researchers from the Department of EnergyвЂ™s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, analyzed data from past sky surveys using sophisticated image-recognition technology to home in on the gravity-based effects that identify the shapes of these filaments.

Scientists have decoded faint distortions in the patterns of the universeвЂ™s earliest light to map huge tubelike structures invisible to our eyes вЂ“ known as filaments вЂ“ that serve as superhighways for delivering matter to dense hubs such as galaxy clusters. (Credit: Siyu He, Shadab Alam, Wei Chen, and Planck/ESA) Researchers used computers to study this weak lensing of the CMB and produce a map of filaments, which typically span hundreds of light years in length. In this illustration, the trajectory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) light is bent by structures known as filaments that are invisible to our eyes, creating an effect known as weak lensing captured by the Planck satellite (left), a space observatory.

Cosmic web