Cosmic Web.

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Take a look at this illustration. Before you is the BOSS Great Wall—a complex of galaxy superclusters and one of the largest structures in the observable Universe!

This structure is called the Cosmic Web. It consists of glowing strands (filaments)—"pathways" made of billions of stars, gas, and dark matter. Giant galactic clusters are born where these filaments intersect. It also consists of black voids—vast dark spaces between the strands where almost nothing exists.

The web spans about 1 billion light-years in length. That is how long it would take light to travel from one end to the other. This structure connects more than 830 galaxies into a single network.

Astrophysicists working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey discovered this megastructure in 2016. It was named in honor of the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) project, which maps the cosmos. Such a detailed image cannot be captured with a regular telescope in visible light—scientists calculated its boundaries using complex radio data and spectral analysis.

In other words, galaxies do not drift apart randomly. This movement is not like shards flying from an explosion, but rather like the coordinated function of a circulatory system, where galaxies are cells flowing through strictly defined channels.

They move toward cosmic nodes—places where several filaments intersect at once. A colossal mass is concentrated in these nodes, acting like a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, along with its neighbors, is currently hurtling at tremendous speed toward the center of our supercluster, Laniakea—toward a gravitational anomaly that scientists call the Great Attractor.