A Universal Continuum of Weight aleph
  We prove that every continuum of weight aleph_1 is a continuous image of the Cech-Stone-remainder R^* of the real line. It follows that under CH the remainder of the half line [0,infty) is universal among the continua of weight c --- universal in the `mapping onto' sense.   We complement this result by showing that   1) under MA every continuum of weight less than c is a continuous image of R^*   2) in the Cohen model the long segment of length omega_2+1 is not a continuous image of R^*, and   3) PFA implies that I_u is not a continuous image of R^*, whenever u is a c-saturated ultrafilter. We also show that a universal continuum can be gotten from a c-saturated ultrafilter on omega and that it is consistent that there is no universal continuum of weight c. 
Alan Dow and Klaas Pieter Hart