A slice of the COSMOS-Web cosmic-web map, created with JWST data, showing galaxies across nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history. (Image credit: UCR/Hossein Hatamnia)

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have mapped the "cosmic web" of galaxies — the largest structure in the universe — with unprecedented detail.

This is the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted to date, and is known as COSMOS-Web. It traces a network of galaxies back to when the universe was about 1 billion years old.

The cosmic web is the term scientists use to describe a skeleton-like framework of filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas along which galaxies gathered and evolved over time, which is punctuated by nearly empty voids.…