ESA Science & Technology - Flying through the cosmic web

This movie shows the three-dimensional structure of the cosmic web, the wispy network of both dark and baryonic matter that is believed to pervade the Universe. The movie was extracted from a numerical simulation of the formation and evolution of cosmic structure.

Galaxy clusters are visible where the concentration of galaxies (shown in white and purple) is higher. Clusters form in the densest knots of the cosmic web, where filaments intersect. The density of gas in the filaments that link the cluster is represented with different colours, with dark brown indicating less dense regions and brighter colours (from orange to yellow and green) indicating increasingly denser regions. The colour scale also shows the gas temperature, ranging from less than a million K in the darker regions up to several tens of million K in the green regions.