Illustration of an artist in a large structure of the universe
Science Photo Library/Aramie
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe. It is 1.4 billion light-years and includes superclusters of nearly 70 galaxies. It is also a majority of the same, hundreds of thousands of times more than a single galaxy, such as the Milky Way.
Hans bÖhringer At the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, his colleagues named the universe structure Quipu after an Inca counting system made from knotted ropes. bÖFlinger saw ropes at a museum near Santiago, Chile, working at an observatory in southern Europe, and thought it resembles a structure with a thick main section and several thin fork sections.
Over a wide range, galaxies can concentrate together on clusters, and themselves can be grouped into larger superclusters. Astronomers have previously mapped some of these superclusters, and it is possible that they frequently combine, such as the walls of Sloan and the superclusters of Laniacakea, which were the largest previous structures known in the universe. I discovered that there are many.
“The Quipu SuperStructure is slightly longer than the Great Wall of Sloan, from end to end,” he says. J. Richard Gott III He helped Sloan discover the Great Wall of China at Princeton University. “Thank you for finding it.”
To find Quipu, bohRinger and his team analyzed data from the German Rosat X-Ray satellite and saw a galaxy cluster hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth. They could be part of a larger structure, using algorithms that allow each cluster to separate from another cluster before thinking it is unlinked. “This was a very obvious structure,” says b.Öhringer. “It catches your eye right away.”
The past discoveries of such large structures have sparked debate among cosmologists, who say they are very large, and have called our basic assumptions about the universe called the principles of cosmology. It’s violating one. This says that at a very long distance, the universe should appear to be spread evenly in all directions.
The superstructures of the universe cohesive together in a non-uniform way, appearing to violate this. But bÖHringer has not seen such a problem, but instead argues that the universe needs to be considered on a larger scale, claiming that similar structures can be found in the most accurate cosmological simulations. There is. “Observing in small parts of the universe that were previously done can be misleading,” he says.
Part of the confusion comes from the ambiguous definition of cosmological principles, he says Alexia Lopez at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. “There is no definition of cosmological principles that all cosmologists agree with,” she says. For example, some cosmologists argue that the universe should look the same at a distance greater than the largest structure we see, while others actually have such a large It should look the same at distances challenged by the structure.
The structure looks like a single object, but it is unknown whether the clusters within it are actually connected by gravity, I say Seshadri Nadathur At the University of Portsmouth in the UK, it could prove problematic as space expands. “Some of these galaxies can drift away from each other rather than fall on their own. In that case, according to some interpretations, it’s not actually a tied structure.” He says.
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