The largest known structure in the universe has been discovered by astronomers this month in a scientific breakthrough. It is 1.4 billion light years across and contains nearly 70 galactic superclusters.
The cosmic structure is so big, in fact, that it is hundreds of thousands of times more massive than a single galaxy, such as the Milky Way. Discovered by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, the structure has been named Quipu, after the Incan counting system made from knotted rope.
Hans Böhringer, who was on the discovery team, saw the Incan ropes in a museum in Chile and felt it resembled the structure, which has a thicker main section and several thinner branching sections, New Scientist reports.
The team of scientists analysed data from the ROSAT X-ray satellite, which looked at galaxy clusters several hundred million light years from Earth.
Previously, the Sloan Great Wall was the largest structure in the universe. J Richard Got III at Princeton University, which helped discover it, said: “The Quipu superstructure, end to end, is slightly longer than the Sloan Great Wall. Congratulations to them for finding it.”
The Sloan Great Wall was discovered in 2003 and spans about 1.4 billion light years. Before that, the Great Wall of galaxies was a record holder for the largest known structure; it was discovered in 1989 to be about 500 million light years long, 300 million light years wide and 15 million light years thick.
While Quipu is in first place, another structure is technically the largest – the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall. However, despite being ten billion light years long, it has not been confirmed as a single, interconnected thing.
Böhringer told EarthSky that Quipu probably will not hold the number one spot for very long – as “larger structures might (quite probably) exist if we inspect ever-larger cosmic volumes”.
The scientists also found four other superstructures and estimated that they contained about 45 per cent of the galaxy clusters, 30 per cent of the galaxies and 25 per cent of the matter in the universe.
In the future, these superstructures are likely to break up into several collapsing units, the researchers said. However, at the moment they are “special physical entities with characteristic properties and special cosmic environments deserving special attention”.
The research paper has been accepted by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics for publication.
