This year astronomers made great progress toward understanding our place in space, gaining a new sense of the three-dimensional structure of the universe around us.
In October a team led by Mathilde Jauzac at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France created a 3-D representation of an enormous filament of dark matter, the invisible substance that fills our universe and binds galaxies together. Some 60 million light-years in length, this thread funnels all kinds of matter—visible and not—from intergalactic space into a giant cluster of galaxies called MACS J0717.5+3745. Jauzac plotted the structure of the filament by studying how its gravity distorts passing light; that information will help trace the unseen dark component of the universe and explain how it interacts with the bright parts we see.
And three months earlier, the team running a huge cosmic cartography project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III released a 3-D map ...
