The cosmic web is spinning. Our universe is full of enormous filaments of matter that stretch between galaxies in a vast, interconnected web – and simulations suggest that those filaments are rotating.

We know that all galaxies spin and that their rotation can be affected by their environments, including any nearby filaments of matter, but we didn’t know whether these huge, thread-like structures also rotate. Now, Qianli Xia at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues have used simulations of how dark matter behaves in filaments to …