An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the largest rotating structures ever reported: a ‘razor-thin’ string of galaxies embedded in a giant spinning cosmic filament, 140 million light-years away. The findings, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could offer valuable new insights into how galaxies formed in the early Universe.
Cosmic filaments are the largest known structures in the Universe: vast, thread-like formations of galaxies and dark matter that form a cosmic scaffolding. They also act as ‘highways’ along which matter and momentum flow into galaxies. Nearby filaments containing many galaxies spinning in the same direction-and where the whole structure appears to be rotating – are ideal systems to explore how galaxies gained the spin and gas they have today. They can also provide a way to test theories about how cosmic rotation builds up over tens of millions of light-years.
What makes this structure exceptional is not just its size, but the combination of spin alignment and rotational motion. You can liken it to the teacups ride at a theme park. Each galaxy is like a spinning teacup, but the whole platform-the cosmic filament-is rotating too.
Astronomers have observed the longest-ever gamma-ray burst — a powerful, extragalactic explosion that lasted over seven hours. Rapid follow-up observations with the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera and the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, provided crucial information about the possible origin of this extraordinary event and the galaxy that hosts it.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most powerful explosions in the Universe, second only to the Big Bang. The majority of these bursts are observed to flash and fade within a few seconds to minutes. But on 2 July 2025, astronomers were alerted to a GRB source that was exhibiting repeating bursts and would end up lasting over seven hours. This event, dubbed GRB 250702B, is the longest gamma-ray burst humans have ever witnessed.
GRB 250702B was first identified by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi). Shortly after space-based telescopes detected the initial bursts in gamma-rays and pinpointed its on-sky location in X-rays, astronomers around the world launched campaigns to observe the event in additional wavelengths of light.
Using NASA’s Swift and Fermi space telescopes, Indian astronomers have conducted a long-term multiwavelength study of a nearby blazar designated TXS 0518+211. Results of the study, published Nov. 26 on the arXiv pre-print server, reveal the complex nature of this object.
Blazars are very compact quasi-stellar objects (quasars) associated with supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of active, giant elliptical galaxies. They are the most luminous and extreme subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The characteristic features of blazars are highly collimated relativistic jets pointed almost exactly toward Earth.
Blazars are usually divided by astronomers into two classes, based on their optical emission properties: flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) that feature prominent and broad optical emission lines, and BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), which do not.
If you look across space with a telescope, you’ll see countless galaxies, most of which host large central black holes, billions of stars and their attendant planets. The universe teems with huge, spectacular objects, and it might seem like these massive objects should hold most of the universe’s matter.
But the Big Bang theory predicts that about 5% of the universe’s contents should be atoms made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Most of those atoms cannot be found in stars and galaxies—a discrepancy that has puzzled astronomers.
If not in visible stars and galaxies, the most likely hiding place for the matter is in the dark space between galaxies. While space is often referred to as a vacuum, it isn’t completely empty. Individual particles and atoms are dispersed throughout the space between stars and galaxies, forming a dark, filamentary network called the “cosmic web.”
A new theory for the origins of dark matter suggests that fast-moving, neutrino-like dark particles could have decoupled from Standard Model particles far earlier than previous theories had suggested.
Through new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Stephen Henrich and Keith Olive at the University of Minnesota proposes that this “ultra-relativistic freeze-out” mechanism could have produced dark matter particles which are almost undetectable, but still compatible with the observed history of the universe.
Despite comprising some 85% of the universe’s total mass, dark matter has never been seen to interact with regular matter except via gravity, making its origins one of the most enduring mysteries in cosmology.
In the leading model of cosmology, most of the universe is invisible: a combined 95% is made of dark matter and dark energy. Exactly what these dark components are remains a mystery, but they have a tremendous impact on our universe, with dark matter exerting a gravitational pull and dark energy driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.
What scientists know about dark matter and dark energy comes from observing their effects on the visible universe. Astrophysicists from the University of Chicago have measured those effects on a new patch of sky to illuminate the invisible cosmos.
An international team led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the largest rotating structures ever reported: a “razor-thin” string of galaxies embedded in a giant spinning cosmic filament, 140 million light-years away.
The findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could offer valuable new insights into how galaxies formed in the early universe.
Cosmic filaments are the largest known structures in the universe: vast, thread-like formations of galaxies and dark matter that form a cosmic scaffolding. They also act as “highways” along which matter and momentum flow into galaxies.
An exploration of the mystery of the impossible neutrino detection and how that might be our first direct detection of dark matter.
My Patreon Page:
/ johnmichaelgodier.
My Event Horizon Channel:
/ eventhorizonshow.
Music: