Astronomers detect never-seen-before shock waves rocking the web of the universe

Combining thousands of images taken from radio telescopes helped astronomers discover for the first time that shock waves ripple through the cosmic web, which is a giant collection of galaxies, dark matter, and gas that occupies the universe. The images showcased a slight glow cast as shock waves sent charged particles through the magnetic fields that are found in the cosmic web, researchers reported in Science Advances journal.

The new discovery, according to Science News, will help space researchers unravel the mysteries of large magnetic fields. Astronomers “can confirm what so far has only been predicted by simulations — that these shock waves exist,” said Marcus Brüggen, an astrophysicist at the University of Hamburg in Germany.

According to cosmic web simulations, shock waves in space are created as a result of continuous cosmic activities which involve gas, filament collision, and forces of gravity. In the past, astronomers have noticed shock waves around galaxy clusters, but the waves “have never been really seen" in filaments, said astronomer Reinout van Weeren of Leiden University in the Netherlands.

New discovery is 'exciting', researchers say 

“But they should be basically all around the cosmic web," he added. On the other hand, radio astronomer Tessa Vernstrom of Australia's International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research said that a singular shock wave in a filament “would look like nothing, it’d look like noise."

But Vernstrom, along with her fellow researchers, amalgamated images of over 600,000 pairs of galaxy clusters that were in close proximity to be connected through filaments to come up with a single “stacked” image. “When you can dig below the noise and still actually get a result — to me, that’s personally exciting,” Vernstrom said.