Feige Wang: Finder of Galactic Filaments

Dr. Feige Wang began his career by searching for the universe’s most distant super-massive black holes. Now that he’s found them, he is working to understand their surrounding environment. In the last 20 years, we’ve come to understand that the universe is bound together by a “cosmic web”—an underlying structure of dense galaxy clusters stitched together by thin chains of galaxies that bridge the void between.  Astronomers believe that this web became more distinct as time and gravity stretched and pulled galaxies into formation, and now the James Webb Space Telescope is allowing Wang and his colleagues to sleuth out the foundations of this cosmic architecture. Wang, along with the rest of the ASPIRE team, has discovered “one of the earliest filamentary structures that people have ever found associated with a distant quasar:” a strand of 10 galaxies all drawn into narrow formation by a single luminous quasar, or supermassive black hole, that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. It would take 3 million light years to travel from end to end of the filament which, like a long skein of newly spun yarn, might eventually be woven together into a tighter tapestry of galaxies by the hand of gravity.

This discovery is the result of multiple instruments working in concert. Wang shows an image onscreen of the newly discovered galactic filament: galaxies of different colors, at different distances, with the quasar searing the top quadrant of the picture like a firecracker. Using  JWST alone, not all of these galaxies would have shown up in the image. Instead, overlaid across JWST data are submillimeter observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—the largest radio telescope in the world. Composed of over 60 movable radio dishes poised high on a volcano-rimmed plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert, ALMA gathers invisible light (radio waves) from dusty red galaxies that remain hidden to JWST. Both telescopes together give a fuller picture of the early strands of the cosmic web.

Much in the same way that multiple instruments of unique capabilities are being used to sleuth out the shape of the universe in its first billion years, the ASPIRE team also relies on an array of skills, ages, and backgrounds. In particular, the diverse international team embraces the expertise of young researchers, with a large number of graduate students and post-docs taking the reins on the research. This is the next generation of specialists in understanding the nature of quasars, galaxies, and the intergalactic medium. Of all of the strengths of the ASPIRE project, this is Wang’s biggest point of pride.