Educational video showing the Cosmic Web in my Fornax Ultra Deep Field imageMake sure you view this in full screen and with the music turned up.

Watch the full res version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHUpBgQFpoo

Many thanks to my friend Thomas Regin for composing the music specifically for this video!

For full image details see my image The Cosmic Web

Of all my images I feel that this one is the most profound: A relatively empty looking field in the southern constellation Fornax, about the size of the full Moon. This area of the sky is devoid of most bright stars, and contains almost no obscuring interstellar dust or hydrogen emission. It is therefore a window out into the deepest reaches of the observable Universe. It is also the location of the famous Hubble Ultra Deep Field and several other HST studies over the last couple of decades. With around 60 hours of exposure the limiting magnitude is close to 25.0 which is 25 million times fainter than the dimmest naked-eye stars.
At this depth, the background is filled with tens of thousands of distant galaxies. But to see them properly, we must go on a journey - outside of our own Milky Way galaxy. To filter the many background galaxies from the foreground stars I used Gaia DR3 data to identify and remove all stars in the image, and thus revealing just the extragalactic background.
Every single point of light in the resulting image is a galaxy! There are over 20,000 distant galaxies in this single image. With redshifts of up to z=3.354 the farthest are nearly 12 billion light years away. At that distance the field of view spans an incredible 112 x 147 million light years. It is clearly noticeable that the galaxies are not distributed randomly. Instead, galaxy groups and clusters form long filaments with massive voids in between. This vast foam-like structure is known as the Cosmic Web; the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Tiny primordial fluctuations in the dark matter distribution immediately after the Big Bang gave rise to these immense structures, created and shaped by gravity. Their origins are imprinted on the cosmic microwave background observed by the Planck satellite - the oldest light in the Universe.CREDITS:© Rolf Wahl Olsen 2022, www.rolfolsenastrophotography.com

MUSIC / SOUND EFFECTS
Thomas Regin
northbysound.com
youtube.com/thomasregin

VISUALS
Rolf Wahl Olsen
rolfolsenastrophotography.com
youtube.com/rolfwahlolsen

The Cosmic Web / Fornax Ultra Deep Field
rolfolsenastrophotography.com/Astrophotography/Fornax-Ultra-Deep-Field
A Lunar Mineral Map
rolfolsenastrophotography.com/Astrophotography/Solar-System/i-wFtwgc4

CLUES (Constrained Local Universe Evolution Simulations)
eso.org/public/videos/cluesAdler-cylindrical
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

DSS2 / Sky-map.ORG
sky-map.org
archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form

The Cosmic Microwave Background: ESA/Planck
esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2013/03/Planck_CMB

Gaia DR3 Data: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia

This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.