Vast moving ‘space tendrils’ are the biggest spinning object in the universe – but science can’t explain them - The Independent

Tendrils of galaxies hundreds of millions of light years long have been found to be the largest spinning object in the known universe.

After the universe was born from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, the gas that composed most known matter collapsed to form colossal sheets – which were then broken up to form the filaments of this enormous cosmic web.

The Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall is the largest of these discovered, estimated to be 10 billion light years long and home to several billion galaxies.

“Despite being thin cylinders – similar in dimension to pencils – hundreds of millions of light years long, but just a few million light years in diameter, these fantastic tendrils of matter rotate,” said Noam Libeskind, an astronomer at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP).

The motion of these galaxies suggests that they are rotating around the central axis of each filament, with the tendrils regulating the direction of their dark matter halos - invisible material that permeates and surrounds individual galaxies, and is responsible for their curves.