Overview
- The peer-reviewed study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, identifies a spinning filament about 140 million light-years from Earth.
- Within the structure lies a razor-thin string of 14 hydrogen-rich galaxies stretching roughly 5.5 million light-years in length and about 117,000 light-years in width.
- The thin string sits inside a larger filament hosting more than 280 galaxies, where many spins align with the filament, exceeding expectations from random orientations.
- Redshift patterns reveal opposite line-of-sight motions on either side of the spine, leading to a modeled bulk rotation of about 110 km/s and a dense central radius near 50 kiloparsecs.
- The result, derived from MeerKAT MIGHTEE radio data combined with DESI and SDSS spectroscopy, points to a dynamically cold, gas-rich environment and carries implications for galaxy-formation theory and intrinsic-alignment models used in Euclid and Rubin weak-lensing surveys.