Astronomers from Durham University in England have created a three-dimensional fly-through of the universe, using the Galaxy And Mass Assembly galaxy catalogue.
The galaxy images have been blown-up so they pop on camera, but the distances are to scale.
Released by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, the computer simulation goes along with a study by Australian astronomers to understand the galaxies that populate mostly empty regions in our "cosmic web," the mysterious underlying structure that is supposed to dictate the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.
The Australian team says it's found small strings, or tendrils, composed of a few galaxies in the spaces that were previously thought to be empty.
For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.
Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into a gigantic web-like structure. This is called the cosmic web.
There are signatures of this structure in the remaining radiation from the Big Bang and in the layout of the universe itself. Without some mysterious force pulling visible matter into this web, galaxies would be randomly scattered across the universe. But they aren't.
We can see that galaxies are found in groups and those groups come together in larger clusters.
Computer models tell us that those galaxy clusters are linked by long filaments of hot gas and dark matter €" a mystery substance that we can't see because it doesn't radiate or scatter light but that makes up most of the web.
It's believed that gas and dark matter flow along the filaments to form clumps of galaxies where the strands intersect. So filaments are important because they represent what the universe looks like on a large scale. The problem is that, even though we should technically be able to see hot gas filaments, they are really hard to detect.
To find this strand of gas, astronomers where able to take advantage of an extremely bright mass of energy and light known as a quasar.
The light from a quasar located 10 billion light-years-away acted like a "flashlight" to make the surrounding gas glow, researchers report Jan. 19 in the journal Nature. This boosted the Lyman alpha radiation that hydrogen gas emits to detectable levels over a huge swath of the region.
The researchers were able to figure out the wavelength of the Lyman alpha radiation emitted by the gas and used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to get an image at that wavelength.
What they were able to see is a cloud of gas extending two million light years across intergalactic space €" the largest ever found. And it wasn't just a diffuse cloud, there are areas where there is more gas and areas of darker, emptier space. The gas-filled areas are filament, while the emptier areas are the gaps between filaments and galaxy clusters.
"This is a very exceptional object," first author Sebastiano Cantalupo, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz said in a statement. "It's huge, at least twice as large as any nebula detected before, and it extends well beyond the galactic environment of the quasar."
Researchers think that the gas filament is even more extended since they only see the part that is illuminated by the radiation from the quasar.
The research still "provides a terrific insight into the overall structure of our universe," co-author J. Xavier Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz said in statement, since the "quasar is illuminating diffuse gas on scales well beyond any we've seen before, giving us the first picture of extended gas between galaxies."

Oldest known star in the Universe discovered

A team of astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU) working on a five-year project to produce the first comprehensive digital survey of the southern sky has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe. Just a 6,000 light year astronomical hop, skip and jump from Earth, the ancient star formed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Similar to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which is mapping the Northern Hemisphere sky, the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey is casting its telescopic eye on the southern sky. In the first year of the five-year project, the ANU SkyMapper telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory about 500 km (310 miles) north west of Sydney has photographed some 60 million stars.
As well as creating a comprehensive census of the stars in the southern sky, SkyMapper is also tasked with mapping dark matter and uncovering the first quasars and stars to form after the birth of the Universe. The SkyMapper telescope is able to find such ancient stars through its ability to detect, through their color, stars with low iron.
"The stars we are finding number one in a million," said team member Professor Mike Bessell, who worked with Dr Stefan Keller of the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics on the research.
The researchers say the discovery will provide a better idea of what the Universe was like in its infancy by allowing the study of the chemistry of the first stars. According to the team, the composition of the newly-discovered star shows it formed in the wake of a primordial star, which had a mass 60 times that of our Sun.
"To make a star like our Sun, you take the basic ingredients of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang and add an enormous amount of iron - the equivalent of about 1,000 times the Earth's mass,€ said Dr Keller. "To make this ancient star, you need no more than an Australia-sized asteroid of iron and lots of carbon. It's a very different recipe that tells us a lot about the nature of the first stars and how they died."
Although it was previously believed that the death of primordial stars involved extremely violent explosions that spread iron over huge volumes of space, the ancient star shows signs of lighter elements, such as carbon and magnesium, but no sign of iron.
"This indicates the primordial star's supernova explosion was of surprisingly low energy," said Dr Keller. "Although sufficient to disintegrate the primordial star, almost all of the heavy elements such as iron, were consumed by a black hole that formed at the heart of the explosion."
The ancient star's discovery was confirmed using the Magellan telescope in Chile, and a paper detailing the discovery is published in the journal Nature. Data collected by the survey, which is funded by the Australia Research Council, will also be made freely available on the internet.