Here we report the detection of a dark-matter filament connecting the two main components of the Abell 222/ 223 supercluster system from its weak gravitational lensing signal, both in a non-parametric mass reconstruction and in parametric model fits. However, a reliable direct detection of the underlying dark-matter skeleton, which should contain more than half of all matter (7), has remained elusive, because earlier candidates for such detections (8-10) were either falsified (11,12) or suffered from low signal-to-noise ratios (8,10) and unphysical misalignments of dark and luminous matter (9,10). More recently, the warm-hot intergalactic medium (a sparse plasma with temperatures of kelvin to kelvin) residing in low-redshift filaments has been observed in emission (4) and absorption (5,6). The thread-like structure of this 'cosmic web' has been traced by galaxy redshift surveys for decades (2,3).
It is a firm prediction of the concordance cold-dark-matter cosmological model that galaxy clusters occur at the intersection of large-scale structure filaments (1).
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