Record-Breaking Rotating Cosmic Filament Discovered: A 50 Million Light-Year 'Teacup Ride'

Scientists have detected the largest-known rotating structure in the observable universe: a vast, thread-like filament made of nearly 300 galaxies, intergalactic gas and dark matter that forms part of the cosmic web.

Located about 140 million light-years from Earth, the filament was observed primarily with South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope array — 64 linked dishes optimized for mapping faint radio emission across large sky areas. The discovery is reported in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

What Was Found

The structure stretches roughly 50 million light-years in length and is about 117,000 light-years across — comparable in width to a large galaxy but enormously longer. It contains nearly 300 galaxies of varying sizes, along with diffuse gas and a significant dark matter component (dark matter is estimated to make up roughly 27% of the universe on large scales).

How The Rotation Was Measured

Researchers determined the filament is rotating by measuring the motion of galaxies on opposite sides of its central axis: galaxies on one side move in the opposite direction to those on the other side. The team estimates the filament's rotational speed at about 246,000 miles per hour (396,000 km/h).

"This is the largest individual spinning structure so far detected," said Lyla Jung, co-lead author and astrophysicist at the University of Oxford.

Analogy And Significance

Scientists liken the motion to a teacup amusement-park ride: each galaxy spins internally (gas and stars orbiting galaxy centers), while the entire filament rotates as a whole, like the platform under the teacups. The observation provides a new window into the dynamics of the cosmic web on the largest scales and will inform models of structure formation in the universe.

Context

Astrophysicists study the universe across many scales — from fundamental particles to planets, stars, galaxies and the largest structures such as filaments and voids. This work focuses on those largest-scale features and demonstrates how improved radio and optical surveys are expanding our ability to detect and analyze massive cosmic structures.

Study Leads: Madalina Tudorache (University of Cambridge) and Lyla Jung (University of Oxford).
Instrument: MeerKAT radio array (South Africa).
Published In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Daniel Wallis)