It is the universe’s scaffolding, and astronomers say they have now mapped it in sharper detail than ever before.

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers led by the University of California, Riverside created what they describe as the clearest map yet of the cosmic web, the huge structure that links galaxies across space. They traced the network back to a time when the universe was about 1 billion years old.

The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team used COSMOS-Web, the largest JWST survey so far, to examine how galaxies have been arranged within the cosmic web over 13.7 billion years of cosmic history. The survey covers a continuous section of sky about the size of three full moons and was designed to map the cosmic web.

The cosmic web is made up of filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas surrounding large, mostly empty regions known as voids. Those structures connect galaxies and galaxy clusters across huge distances.

“JWST has completely changed our view of the universe, and COSMOS-Web was designed from the start to give us the wide, deep view we need to see the cosmic web,” said Hossein Hatamnia, a graduate student at UCR and Carnegie Observatories, and lead author of the study.

“For the first time we can study the evolution of galaxies in cluster and filamentary structures across cosmic time, all the way from when the universe was a billion years old up to the nearby universe.”

The nearby universe refers to the region within about 1 billion light-years of Earth.

Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR and Hatamnia’s advisor, said the JWST-based map shows far more detail than earlier observations of the same area from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST,” Mobasher said.

“What used to look like a single structure now resolves into many, and details that were smoothed away before, are now clearly visible.”

Hatamnia said the sharper map came from two main strengths of JWST working together.

“The telescope detects many more faint galaxies in the same patch of sky, and the distances to those galaxies are measured far more precisely,” he said.

“Each galaxy can therefore be placed into the correct slice of cosmic time, sharpening the map’s resolution.”

The researchers analyzed more than 164,000 galaxies. The team has also made the large-scale structure maps public.

“The pipeline used to build the map, the catalog of 164,000 galaxies and their cosmic density, and a video showing the cosmic web evolving across billions of years, has been released to the public,” Mobasher said.

The paper is titled “Large-Scale Structure in COSMOS-Web: Tracing Galaxy Evolution in the Cosmic Web up to z ∼ 7 with the Largest JWST Survey.”

Read more from Science Daily.