A universal continuum of weight aleph

We prove that every continuum of weight N-1 is a continuous image of the Ce ch-Stone-remainder R* of the real line. It follows that under CH the remain der of the half line [0, infinity) is universal among the continua of weigh t c - universal in the 'mapping onto' sense. We complement this result by showing that 1) under MA every continuum of we ight less than c is a continuous image of R*, 2) in the Cohen model the lon g segment of length omega (2) + 1 is not a continuous image of R*, and 3) P FA implies that I-u is not a continuous image of R*, whenever u is a c-satu rated ultrafilter. We also show that a universal continuum can be gotten from a c-saturated ul trafilter on omega, and that it is consistent that there is no universal co ntinuum of weight c.