A slice of the COSMOS-Web cosmic-web map, created with JWST data, showing galaxies across nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history. (Image credit: UCR/Hossein Hatamnia) Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have mapped the "cosmic web" of galaxies — the largest structure in the universe — with unprecedented detail. This is the largest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) survey conducted to date, and is known as COSMOS-Web. It traces a network of galaxies back to when the universe was about 1 billion years old. The cosmic web is the term scientists use to describe a skeleton-like framework of filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas along which galaxies gathered and evolved over time, which is punctuated by nearly empty voids. Thus, the cosmic web forms the architecture of the universe — it's a singular, intricate, far-reaching structure that traps galaxies and galactic clusters like flies strung along the sticky silk web of a greedy spider.…