62: The Cosmic Sponge

Space is big, as Douglas Adams so succinctly put it. But how big? And what does the Universe look like when you see it at those scales. The structure of the large-scale cosmos is amazing — beyond galaxies, beyond clusters of galaxies, we're talking super-mega-ludicrous clusters. Clusters of clusters. Madness. In the last 20 years two advances have given us a glimpse of the Universe at these largest scales: surveys of galaxies that map out the cosmos in fine detail, and stupendously complex simulations on powerful supercomputers. At the heart of it all, responsible for the intriguing filaments and walls and voids — the cosmic sponge itself — we find an old, mysterious, dark friend.