‘Cosmic Vine’: Scientists discover enormous structure hosting 20 galaxies

An international team of scientists have discovered an enormous structure which is home to at least 20 massive galaxies. The structure, dubbed ‘Cosmic Vine’,is said to be about 13 million light-years long and 0.65 million light-years wide. It is so massive that it makes our galaxy, the Milky Way, sound like a negligible speck of dust in the vast cosmos.

To put this number into perspective, if we had the ability to travel at impossible lightspeed, it would roughly 100,000 years to travel across the entire Milky Way but even the fastest man-made object ever, the American space agency NASA’s Parker Solar Probe travels at 0.064 per cent the speed of light.

The group of astronomers led by Shuowen Jin of the Technical University of Denmark have detected a new object the investigation of which is said to be fundamental for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.

What is the ‘Cosmic Vine’?

The structure, the findings about which were published on the pre-print server arXiv, is said to consist of at least 20 massive galaxies and six galaxy overdensities, which would add up to a total of 260 billion solar masses.

Cosmic Vine was seen at a redshift of 3.44 in the Extended Groth Strip (EGS) field observed with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which means as per the findings, that the universe was only a 2.5 billion-year-old baby when the structure made its appearance. Current methods estimate the universe’s age at 13.7 billion years.

What makes this discovery significant?

Cosmic Vine is an extremely long and large structure which is also home to two of the most massive galaxies ever found at such a high redshift – Galaxy A and Galaxy E.

Massive and dense structures of galaxies like the Cosmic Vine are perceived as precursors to galaxy clusters which are the biggest gravitationally bound systems in the universe.

Therefore, the study suggests that since Cosmic Vine is not a virialized system, it is on its way to becoming a galaxy cluster and scientists believe that it might provide insights into the formation of such clusters and the emergence of massive galaxies within them.

The international team of researchers also propose a further investigation of quiescent cluster galaxies at high redshifts which they believe would be significant in helping us understand how the largest structures in the universe form and evolve.