Illustration of the artist of the large -scale structure of the universe
Scientific photo library / Alamy
Astronomers have found the largest known structure in the universe. It is 1.4 billion light years in diameter and contains nearly 70 galactic supercomputers. It is also hundreds of thousands of times more massive than one galaxy, such as the Milky Way.
Son BÖHringer At the Max Planck Institute for Munich physics, Germany, and his colleagues appointed this cosmic structure who is after an Inca counting system made from knotted rope. BÖHringer saw the strings in a museum near Santiago, Chile, while working at the Southern European Observatory and thought it looked like the structure, which has a thicker main section and several thinner branching sections.
Over long distances, the galaxies can regroup in clusters, which can themselves be grouped into larger superclusters. Astronomers previously drawn several of these superclusters and have found that they often connect to arcs or sweeping walls, such as the Large Sloan Wall Or the Laniakea SuperCluster, which were the largest previous structures known in the universe.
“The superstructure of Quipu, from start to finish, is slightly longer than the large Sloan wall,” said J. Richard Got III At Princeton University, who helped discover the big Sloan wall. “Congratulations to them for having found it.”
To find Quipu, BOhRinger and his team analyzed the data from the German satellite Rosat X-Ray, looking at clusters of galaxies to several hundred millions of light years from the earth. They worked which could be part of a larger structure using an algorithm which defines a maximum distance that each cluster can be far from another before considering them unrelated. “It was a very apparent structure,” explains BÖHringer. “He immediately draws attention.”
The past discoveries of such important structures have caused arguments between cosmologists, who say that they are so important that they violate one of our fundamental hypotheses on the universe, called the cosmological principle. That said, that at very long distances, the universe should seem uniformly distributed in all directions.
Cosmic superstructures, gathering unevenly, seem to violate this. But BÖHringer does not see such a problem, instead, we must simply consider the universe on even larger scales, and that similar structures can be found in the most precise cosmological simulations. “Observations in an overly small part of the universe, which was made earlier, can be misleading,” he said.
Part of the confusion comes from an ambiguous definition of the cosmological principle, known as Alexia Lopez at the University of the Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom. “There is not yet a definition of the cosmological principle on which each cosmologist agrees,” she says. For example, some cosmologists argue that the universe just needs to be similar to distances greater than the largest structures we see, while others say that the universe should be alike on the distances which are, in fact, questioned by such large structures.
Although the structure seems to be a single object, it is not clear if the clusters inside are in fact linked by gravitation Sesadrri Naadathur At the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, which could prove problematic as the universe develops. “Some of these galaxies can deviate from each other instead of collapsing on themselves, in which case, according to certain interpretations, it is not really a linked structure,” he said.
