India, Feb. 1 -- A team of international scientists led by Eshita Banerjee, a PhD scholar at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune and her supervisor Sowgat Muzahid, has discovered a giant cosmic web filament stretching nearly 850,000 light-years by analyzing light emitted 11.7 billion years ago.

The discovery was made possible using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Galaxies are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Modern galaxy evolution theories predict that galaxies are interconnected by vast, invisible streams of gas and dark matter, collectively referred to as the cosmic web. These cosmic web filaments serve as the nurseries ...