Ok, what's the biggest structure known to man, other than the universe itself ?
I didn't know anything about this before today, as I stumbled on this article on Wikipedia while looking for stuff about galaxies and such. Here is the biggest "thing" know to man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Great_Wall
Its the Sloan Great Wall. It's a giant wall of galaxies ! Or if you prefer, a galaxy filament. It's a massive 1.37 billion light years wide wall made of galaxies.
I didn't know there were walls of galaxies out there. I thought galaxies were only hanging in clusters and such, but it seems hyper-clusters do exist. Pretty much like galaxies and other celestial bodies, a galaxy walls may be more or less dense, and smaller or bigger in size. The Sloan Great Wall would be currently the biggest one. These walls, or sheets of galaxies are separated from each others by bubble-like voids. Some of these void bubbles can have up to a billion light years in diameter, which is massive for something that contains ... nothing. Or nothing visible ?
Some pretend those empty spaces might be filled with dark matter ? They also consider that the gravity created by all these massive amounts of dark matter contained in the void holds those galaxy walls and hyper-clusters in place.
Does that make sense ? It would mean the biggest structures in the universe would be bubbles of dark matter, something we can't even see ?
--Numenorean7
I didn't know anything about this before today, as I stumbled on this article on Wikipedia while looking for stuff about galaxies and such. Here is the biggest "thing" know to man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Great_Wall
Its the Sloan Great Wall. It's a giant wall of galaxies ! Or if you prefer, a galaxy filament. It's a massive 1.37 billion light years wide wall made of galaxies.
I didn't know there were walls of galaxies out there. I thought galaxies were only hanging in clusters and such, but it seems hyper-clusters do exist. Pretty much like galaxies and other celestial bodies, a galaxy walls may be more or less dense, and smaller or bigger in size. The Sloan Great Wall would be currently the biggest one. These walls, or sheets of galaxies are separated from each others by bubble-like voids. Some of these void bubbles can have up to a billion light years in diameter, which is massive for something that contains ... nothing. Or nothing visible ?
Some pretend those empty spaces might be filled with dark matter ? They also consider that the gravity created by all these massive amounts of dark matter contained in the void holds those galaxy walls and hyper-clusters in place.
Does that make sense ? It would mean the biggest structures in the universe would be bubbles of dark matter, something we can't even see ?
Full size image:
What's a galaxy filament:
More information about large-scale structures of the universe:
End of Greatness
The End of Greatness is an observational scale discovered at roughly 100 Mpc (roughly 300 million lightyears) where the lumpiness seen in the large-scale structure of the universe is homogenized and isotropized as per the Cosmological Principle. The superclusters and filaments seen in smaller surveys are randomized to the extent that the smooth distribution of the universe is visually apparent. It was not until the redshift surveys of the 1990s were completed that this scale could accurately be observed.
--Numenorean7