Cosmic web filament discovery hailed among top ten breakthroughs in physics of 2014

An astronomical discovery made by Sebastiano Cantalupo, who recently returned to ETH as Oberassistant at the Institute for Astronomy, has been identified by “Physics World” as one of the top ten breakthroughs in Physics of 2014. While at the University of California Santa Cruz, Cantalupo led a team that discovered an unprecedentedly large Ly-alpha nebula around one of the brightest quasars in the sky, at a redshift z = 2.3.  The nebula is so large that it is being hailed as providing the first direct image of the cosmic web of gas that cosmologists have long believed must exist in the early Universe. This exciting area of research is one of the major focuses of the ETH involvement in the revolutionary MUSE instrument, which was commissioned this year on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The ETH MUSE programme of observations will enable the detection and study of even larger and more diffuse cosmic web structures.

News Department of Physics ETH Zurich
January 2014: Nature and NZZ
Prof. Simon Lilly’s Observational Cosmology Research Group.

Picture: Sebastiano Cantalupo

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2014 at 13:35 and is filed under Announcement, Awards, für externes Zielpublikum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.