Astronomers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in collaboration with scientists in China and Estonia, said on June 14, 2021, that they’ve discovered a rotation – a spin – on an enormous scale never seen before.

They made the discovery by mapping the motion of galaxies in huge filaments or strands of what’s called the cosmic web.

And they found that these long tendrils of galaxies and matter, forming the vast cosmic filaments of the cosmic web, rotate on the scale of hundreds of millions of light-years.

Astronomers say that vast clusters of galaxies lie at the nodes, or connection points, of the cosmic web.

A cosmic filament made of galaxies – now known to be spinning – spans the vast distant between clusters of galaxies.

As Noam Libeskind said above, the galaxies in the filaments funnel on corkscrew paths into the clusters at their ends.

By mapping the motion of galaxies in these huge cosmic superhighways using the Sloan Digital Sky survey – a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies – we found a remarkable property of these filaments: they spin.

After all, there must have been a period during which – as the early universe expanded outward from the Big Bang, and as galaxies began to form – the galaxies for some reason pulled themselves into these vast filaments, creating the cosmic web in the first place.

The galaxies compose strands or filaments in the cosmic web