Astronomers have discovered one of the largest rotating structures ever seen in the universe: a razor-thin line of galaxies inside a massive, spinning cosmic filament.
The structure lies about 140 million light-years from Earth and offers a rare window into how galaxies formed and gained their spin in the early universe.
The research was carried out by an international team led by the University of Oxford and published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Cosmic filaments are the biggest structures we know of—huge threads made of galaxies and dark matter that stretch across the universe like a giant web.
They act like highways, guiding gas and matter toward galaxies and helping shape how galaxies grow.
Scientists are especially interested in nearby filaments where many galaxies spin in the same direction, because these systems can reveal how galaxies first picked up their rotation and how large structures influence their motion over millions of years.
In this study, researchers identified 14 gas-rich galaxies arranged in a long, narrow line about 5.5 million light-years long but only 117,000 light-years wide. This thin line sits inside a much larger filament that contains more than 280 galaxies and stretches roughly 50 million light-years across.
What makes this system so unusual is that many of the galaxies appear to be spinning in the same direction as the filament itself—much more often than would occur by chance. This suggests that the filament may be shaping how its galaxies spin far more strongly than scientists previously believed.
The team also found evidence that the entire filament is rotating. Galaxies on opposite sides of the filament are moving in opposite directions, which hints that the whole structure is slowly turning like a giant cosmic wheel.
By modeling the filament’s dynamics, the scientists estimated a rotation speed of about 110 kilometers per second. They also calculated that the filament’s densest inner region has a radius of about 50 kiloparsecs, or 163,000 light-years.
According to co-lead author Dr. Lyla Jung, the structure is like a theme-park teacup ride: each galaxy is spinning on its own, but the entire platform—the filament—is also rotating.
This combination gives researchers a rare chance to study how galaxies might gain their spin from the larger cosmic structures they are born into.
The filament also appears to be young and relatively undisturbed. Many of its galaxies contain large amounts of hydrogen gas, the basic ingredient for making new stars.
Galaxies rich in hydrogen are especially useful for tracing how gas moves along cosmic filaments and flows into galaxies, shaping their future evolution.
These findings may also help scientists improve models of galaxy alignment, an important factor for future cosmology missions such as the Euclid space telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Co-lead author Dr. Madalina Tudorache says the filament acts like a “fossil record” of cosmic flows, helping researchers piece together how galaxies have grown and evolved over time.
The discovery was made with South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, combined with optical data from DESI and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Professor Matt Jarvis, leader of the MIGHTEE survey that revealed the filament, says the work highlights how powerful multi-observatory collaborations can be in uncovering the universe’s hidden structures.
