Overview

• The filament stretches diagonally through the Shapley Supercluster, linking four galaxy clusters over 23 million light-years with gas at temperatures above 10 million degrees and mass roughly ten times that of the Milky Way.
• JAXA’s Suzaku telescope provided wide-field mapping of the filament’s faint X-ray glow while ESA’s XMM-Newton pinpointed and removed contaminating sources such as supermassive black holes.
• Astronomers estimate that the hot gas thread contains a substantial fraction of the universe’s missing baryonic matter, accounting for over one-third of normal matter previously undetected.
• Results align almost exactly with long-standing cosmological models, offering the first direct observational validation of large-scale simulations of the cosmic web.
• Published June 19, 2025 in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the study establishes a new benchmark for tracing baryon distribution across cosmic web filaments