The behaviour of one of nature’s humblest creatures and archival data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the Universe.

In shaping the Universe, gravity builds a vast cobweb-like structure of filaments tying galaxies and clusters of galaxies together along invisible bridges of gas and dark matter hundreds of millions of light-years long. There is an uncanny resemblance between the two networks, one crafted by biological evolution, the other by the primordial force of gravity.

The cosmic web is the large-scale backbone of the cosmos, consisting primarily of dark matter and laced with gas, upon which galaxies are built. Even though dark matter cannot be seen, it makes up the bulk of the Universe’s material. Astronomers have had a difficult time finding these elusive strands, because the gas within them is too dim to be detected.

The existence of a web-like structure to the Universe was first hinted at in galaxy surveys in the 1980s. Since those studies, the grand scale of this filamentary structure has been revealed by subsequent sky surveys. The filaments form the boundaries between large voids in the Universe. Now a team of researchers has turned to slime mould to help them build a map of the filaments in the local Universe (within 100 million light-years of Earth) and find the gas within them.

They designed a computer algorithm, inspired by the behaviour of slime mould, and tested it against a computer simulation of the growth of dark matter filaments in the Universe. A computer algorithm is essentially a recipe that tells a computer precisely what steps to take to solve a problem.

The researchers then applied the slime mould algorithm to data containing the locations of over 37,000 galaxies mapped by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The algorithm produced a three-dimensional map of the underlying cosmic web structure.

Story Source: Materials provided by ESA/Hubble Information Centre. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.