Live Science8%
James Webb telescope's largest-ever map of the universe unmasks hidden corners 20%
By Ivan Farkas20%
7/6/2026, 3:08:25 AM
Keywords: James Webb Space Telescope, Cosmic Web, Astronomy, Universe, Galaxy Formation, Redshift, Dark Matter
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Optimism Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 44.4% saturation with 235 hits. Analysis detected 1,399 faulty-reasoning hits from 529 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.1% and a BS Rank of 20% (17,693 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 80.80% of the article peer group.
Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web.
The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters.
It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos.
Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us.
The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition.
Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies — including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects.
(Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.)
Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.
Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web, the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons.
"We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email.
"At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."
This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized.
Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars.
Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets.
Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago — around half the age of the universe, the team found.
In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars.
Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies.
"The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement.
The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.
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100%flagged-word coverageBahram Mobasher
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