the.com/cosmic web
The universe's actual shape: galaxies strung like dew on invisible filaments of dark matter.
means The large-scale structure of the universe, in which galaxies and gas are arranged into filaments, clusters, and sheets surrounding vast empty voids, rather than being scattered randomly.
from Not an old word at all — it's a late-20th-century scientific coinage. As cosmologists built the first computer simulations and galaxy-redshift surveys in the 1980s, they saw matter clumping into filaments and walls around huge voids, resembling strands of a spiderweb or a tangle of yarn. 'Cosmic web' stuck as the natural descriptive term, 'cosmic' from Greek 'kosmos' (order, universe) and 'web' from the Old English 'webb,' meaning woven fabric — a name built from plain description rather than myth.
- architecture
- filaments, walls, and voids, not random scatter
- scale
- strands span hundreds of millions of light-years
- empty space
- voids make up most of the universe's volume
- origin
- gravity amplifying tiny ripples from the big bang