Galaxies in a cosmic spider web made of dark matter

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have found six galaxies orbiting a supermassive black hole when the universe was less than a billion years old. The galaxies are in a kind of cosmic “spider web” of gas that covers an area 300 times the size of the Milky Way. “The filaments of the cosmic web are like spider web threads,” explains Marco Mignoli, astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy, and lead author of the new research published today in A...