“We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, who led the first detection. A second magnetized filament has already been spotted elsewhere in the cosmos by means of the same techniques. There, they discovered the largest magnetic field yet: 10 million light-years of magnetized space spanning the entire length of this “filament” of the cosmic web. Last year, astronomers finally managed to examine a far sparser region of space - the expanse between galaxy clusters.
Invisible field lines swoop through intergalactic space like the grooves of a fingerprint. Twenty years ago, astronomers started to detect magnetism permeating entire galaxy clusters, including the space between one galaxy and the next. These force fields - the same entities that emanate from fridge magnets - surround Earth, the sun and all galaxies. Anytime astronomers figure out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them.
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