Astronomers have discovered the largest object in the universe. Impossible space objects, but they exist in reality The largest objects in the universe for fools
Not always people, looking at the sky, can imagine the true dimensions of the Sun. But what can I say, even the size of the Earth itself is difficult to imagine when you stand on its surface. People are accustomed to the fact that bugs, cats and dogs are small, and they themselves are large and strong, perhaps slightly smaller than elephants, but still large. On a cosmic scale, a person cannot even be compared with a bacterium. If we consider that our planet contains 7.7 billion people living on 30% of its territory (everything else is occupied by the World Ocean), then each person individually already resembles a grain of sand. But the Earth is not even the largest planet in the solar system. But if I now tell you the figure of 2.4 billion kilometers, then you can hardly imagine how much or how little it is. Therefore, we will begin to consider the largest objects in the Universe with the examples most accessible to man, so that you have something to compare with.
We all know that beetles are small insects, the size of a maximum of a fingernail. However, some types of beetles can reach 15-17 centimeters in length. For example, the body length of titan woodcutters varies between 8-17 centimeters, but according to some sources it can reach 21 centimeters. The average height of a person ranges from 170 to 180 centimeters. This means that people are only 10 times larger than small beetles, which is nothing on the scale of the Universe, and you will soon see this. By the way, the largest workable phone on Earth is a copy of Samsung SCH-R450, created by Cricket. The dimensions of the phone are 4.5 × 3.5 × 0.74 meters. The largest land animal in the world is the African elephant. Males of this species reach from 6 to 7.5 meters in length and up to 3.8 meters in height. And the largest living creature on our planet is the blue (or blue) whale. The size of the animal reaches 30 meters in length and weighs up to 200 tons. That is, it takes about seventeen people to get the length of a whale.
The tallest building in the world is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Burj Khalifa (the so-called building) rises 828 meters above the ground. Whatever you count for a long time, that's about 28 whales or 480 people. In Saudi Arabia, the construction of the Burj Jeddah building is currently underway, the height of which should be 1,007 meters. If we take ten thousand such towers and put them on top of each other, then we get the length of the Russian Federation from west to east, namely 10,000 kilometers. This is larger than the radius of our planet, which has a standardized equatorial value of 6,378 km. The length of the equator (an imaginary line passing in the middle of the Earth and dividing it into two hemispheres) is 40,075 kilometers.
Now we get to the fun part. Our solar system is not only composed of the sun and planets. Someone, of course, will immediately add that there are still satellites and asteroids. And those who have followed astronomical discoveries and disputes in recent decades also know about the existence of dwarf planets. But we will analyze everything in detail. To begin with, in 1801, the dwarf planet Ceres was discovered by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. For a whole decade, it was mistakenly considered a full-fledged planet, then it was classified as an asteroid, and only in 2006 it took its place among the dwarf planets. Ceres was previously considered the largest asteroid. The diameter of this dwarf planet is 945-950 kilometers. Now the largest asteroid in the solar system is Vesta with a diameter of 525.5 km.
Pluto, in contrast to Ceres, which in the 21st century received a "promotion", has a sadder story. From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto was believed to be the ninth planet in the solar system. However, the International Astronomical Union decided to revise the concept of "planet" in the middle of the first decade of the XXI century. According to the new classification, Pluto has become the largest dwarf planet along with Eris. The diameter of the two objects is 2,376 and 2,326 kilometers, respectively. For comparison: the diameter of the moon is 3,474 kilometers. The largest satellite in the solar system revolves around Jupiter and is called Ganymede. It is one of four satellites discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Its diameter is 5,268 kilometers.
But all the objects considered above, as you understand, are even smaller than the Earth, and we have collected here to learn about the largest objects in the Universe. Let's start with Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. The diameter of this gas giant is approximately 139,822 kilometers. Determining the largest exoplanet (the so-called planets that are outside the solar system) in the Universe is a rather difficult task, since some gas giants are so large that they look like stars, but their mass is insufficient to support nuclear reactions of hydrogen burning and turning into a star ... Discovered in 2013, HD 100546 b is believed to be the largest known exoplanet, with a diameter 6.9 times that of Jupiter. The diameter of the Sun, the closest star to the Earth, is ten times the diameter of Jupiter (or 109 times the diameter of the Earth) - 1.392 million kilometers. The mass of the Sun is 99.866% of the total mass of the entire solar system.
However, if you think that the Sun is a large object, then I will disappoint you. The largest known star in the universe is the red hypergiant UY in the constellation UY Scuti. This star has a diameter of 2.4 billion kilometers, which is 1,700 times that of the Sun! Imagine that you have drawn a circle with a diameter of 1 mm on the asphalt with chalk (count, just put a dot), and so the UY of the Shield will be represented by a circle with a diameter of almost two meters. If we place UY Shield in the center of the Solar System, then its photosphere (the radiating layer of the stellar atmosphere) will cover the orbit of Jupiter. But there is another interesting fact here. The radius of the red hypergiant NML Cygnus is estimated from 1,642 to 2,755 solar radii, which means that in theory this star could be one and a half times larger than the UY Shield.
But why argue about which star is larger, if it is still crumbs compared to black holes - regions of space-time, the gravitational attraction of which is so great that even objects moving at the speed of light cannot leave them. In 2018, an object was discovered that received the rather complicated name SDSS J140821.67 + 025733.2. In fact, it is a quasar - quasi-stellar radiosource, which translated into Russian means "a radio source similar to a star." Quasars are located at the center of active galaxies and are among the brightest objects known in the Universe, emitting a thousand times more energy than, for example, the Milky Way (the Milky Way - the galaxy in which we live). In the center of quasars there are supermassive black holes that absorb the surrounding matter, forming an accretion disk, which is the source of radiation. SDSS J140821 has a diameter of 1.17 trillion kilometers, or about one tenth of a light year.
I remembered about the astronomical unit "light year" not by chance, but so that you could at least roughly imagine the following values. Our Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 105,700 light years, which is a million times the diameter of SDSS J140821. Now look at the picture above, because it shows the largest known galaxy in the Universe so far, IC 1101. Its diameter ranges from 4 to 6 million light years. Galaxy IC 1101 is located about one billion light-years away. It contains about 100 trillion stars, while our galaxy can contain from 200 to 400 billion stars. The galaxies, in turn, are united into clusters.
First, a little background. Scientists have long noticed that our galaxy is moving at high speed in a certain direction, presumably under the influence of the gravitational forces of some massive cluster of objects. It was decided to conditionally call this cluster the "Great Attractor". However, it was not possible to consider this area for a long time due to the fact that it was hidden behind the plane of the Milky Way. Only with the advent of X-ray telescopes did astronomers manage to study the area of the Great Attractor. It turned out that there are much fewer galaxies, which means much less mass to create the necessary gravitational forces to attract the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Scientists began to peer further. And at a distance of 500-600 million light-years from Earth, they found a supermassive structure in the Shapley supercluster, which is the most massive of the 220 known superclusters of galaxies in the observable universe. It contains a mass about 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way and 4 times the mass observed in the region of the Great Attractor. However, even this find cannot fully explain the movement of the Milky Way. So, probably, the data of scientists are still incomplete. An important role is also played by the not fully understood distribution of dark matter (the center of gravity of its clusters may not coincide with the center of gravity of the local supercluster), which determines the large-scale structure of the Universe.
In any case, reading such numbers, it is already difficult to say that a person is a big creature, right? But even these values will seem childish to you, already at the end of this paragraph. The fact is that in space there are such formations as voids (from the English void - "emptiness"). These are vast regions between galactic filaments, in which galaxies and clusters are absent or almost absent, that is, relatively empty regions of space. Scientists believe that voids make up up to 50% of the volume of the Universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to super-strong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them. The largest such object recorded by mankind is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. Supervoid Eridani measures 1.8 by 3 billion light years across. According to some physicists, such relic cold spots may be a reflection of another universe, caused by the quantum entanglement between universes.
At the same time, not only empty spaces, but also supermassive clusters filled with light are huge in the Universe. Discovered in 2012, the Huge-LQG Huge Quasar Group, U1.27 is the largest cluster with 73 quasars. The diameter of this object is 4 billion light years. If that tells you anything, then it's about 38 trillion kilometers. This cluster is one of the largest structures in the observable universe. 5 billion light years. This is exactly the diameter of the Giant GRB Ring. Astronomers, studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that are formed as a result of the death of massive stars), found a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were at the same distance from the Earth, which formed this structure. By itself, "ring" is just a term describing the visual representation of this phenomenon when viewed from Earth. Most likely, the giant gamma ring is a projection of a certain sphere around which gamma radiation was emitted for a relatively short period of time (about 250 million years). Now try to rest a little, because we are approaching the most incredible object, so huge that even the super voids seem small against its background.
The largest structural object in the Universe was discovered by astronomers as part of observing gamma radiation and received one of the most poetic names for the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown (The Hercules – Corona Borealis Great Wall). The most interesting thing is that the object received such a name thanks to a Filipino teenager, who simply entered it on Wikipedia immediately after the news about the discovery of the “wall” in November 2013. The Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown is a galactic filament or wall made up of groups of galaxies connected by gravity, the size of which in its longest direction is 10 billion light years. In fact, this structure occupies about 10% of the visible Universe. Its discovery completely crossed out the existing cosmological principle of the homogeneity of the Universe. This is the main provision of modern cosmology, according to which each observer at the same time, regardless of the place and direction of observation, discovers the same picture in the Universe on average. The scale at which uniformity should appear is 250-300 million light years. After the discovery of the Huge group of quasars measuring 4 billion light-years, which is 13.5 times the specified value, scientists became wary. However, the existence of the Great Wall Hercules - the Northern Crown, which is more than 30 times larger than the established scale, did indeed call into question the cosmological principle. In addition, we see this wall as it was about 10 billion years ago, that is, 3.79 billion years after the Big Bang. The presence of such a huge and massive structure at such an early stage is impossible, based on the existing model of the formation of the Universe. This means that scientists still do not know anything about the world in which we live.
Although the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown is the largest structural object in the universe, our article is not yet complete. In astronomy, there is such a thing as the Cosmic Web. It is believed that all the largest structures, such as filaments, voids, superclusters, walls, and so on, form a single structure, so to speak, the "skeleton of the universe." In 2014, the work of researchers was published who managed to observe the filament of the cosmic web at a great cosmological distance, "highlighted" by a quasar. That is, the light emitted by the black hole “warmed up” the matter of the filament and made it glow. The web turned out to be about ten times more massive than theoretically assumed, and it was not possible to find an explanation for this fact. It is believed that the threads of the Cosmic Web are a kind of bridge for the gravitational interaction between galaxies.
But you and I, most likely, will never know whether there are larger objects in the Universe, because people cannot look beyond the boundaries of the observable Universe. At the moment, the accompanying distance (the distance that does not change in time due to the expansion of space) to the most distant observed object (the surface of the last scattering of the CMB) is approximately 14 billion parsecs or 46 billion light years. Therefore, the actually observable universe for humanity is a ball centered in the solar system, with a diameter of approximately 93 billion light years.
If we draw a rough analogy, then our planet is just one atom of a small screw in the chair of a tanker floating in the ocean. So, the Earth is a small planet in the solar system, which, in turn, is part of the Milky Way. Further, our galaxy, together with the Andromeda galaxy and the Triangulum galaxy, form the Local Group of galaxies. More than 100 groups and clusters of galaxies are part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is part of the wall or Pisces – Cetus Supercluster Complex. All this is theoretically connected by the Cosmic Web and, together with the cosmic voids, makes up the Universe we observe.
The oceans are, of course, vast, and the mountains are impressive in their size. 7 billion people is also not a small number. Since we live on planet Earth (which is 12,742 km in diameter), it's easy for us to forget how tiny we really are. In order to realize this, all we have to do is look into the night sky. Looking into it, it becomes clear that we are just a particle of dust in an unimaginably huge universe. The list of objects below will help you see the greatness of a person in perspective.
10. Jupiter
The largest planet (diameter 142.984 km)
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Ancient astronomers called Jupiter the king of the Roman gods. Jupiter is the 5th planet from the Sun. Its atmosphere is 84% hydrogen and 15% helium with minor additions of acetylene, ammonia, ethane, methane, phosphite, and water vapor. Jupiter's mass is 318 times that of Earth, and its diameter is 11 times that of Earth. Jupiter's mass is 70% of the mass of all other planets in our solar system. Jupiter's volume can accommodate 1,300 Earth-sized planets. Jupiter has 63 satellites known to science (moons), but almost all of them are very small and dim.
9. Sun
The largest object in the solar system (diameter 1.391.980 km) 
The sun (yellow dwarf star) is the largest object in the solar system. Its mass is 99.8% of the entire mass of the solar system, and the mass of Jupiter takes up almost everything else. At the moment, the mass of the Sun consists of 70% hydrogen and 28% helium. All other components (metals) occupy less than 2%. The percentages change very slowly as the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core. Conditions in the Sun's core, which occupies about 25% of the star's radius, are extreme. The temperature reaches 15.6 million degrees Kelvin, and the pressure reaches 250 billion atmospheres. The Sun's power of 386 billion megawatts is provided by nuclear fusion reactions. Every second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen is converted into 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons of energy in the form of gamma rays.
8. Solar system
Our solar system consists of a central star (the Sun) and nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as well as numerous moons, millions of rocky asteroids and billions of icy comets.
7. VY Big Dog (VY CMa)
The largest star in the universe (3 billion kilometers in diameter) 
VY Canis Majoris is the largest and also one of the brightest stars known to date. It is a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major. Its radius is 1800-2200 times greater than that of the Sun, and its diameter is 3 billion kilometers. If it were placed in our solar system, its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn. Some astronomers disagree with this statement and believe that the star VY Canis Major is actually much smaller, only 600 times larger than the Sun, and would only stretch to the orbit of Mars.
6. Largest amount of water ever found
Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest body of water ever found in the universe. The giant cloud, 12 billion years old, carries 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. A cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called Quasar, located 12 billion light-years from Earth. According to scientists, this discovery proved that water predominated in the universe throughout its existence.
5. Extremely huge supermassive black holes
(21 billion times the mass of the Sun) 
A supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole in the galaxy, ranging in size from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses. It is believed that most, if not all, galaxies, including the Milky Way, contain a supermassive black hole at the center. One of these newly discovered monsters, weighing 21 billion times the mass of the Sun, is a vortex of egg-shaped stars. Known as NGC 4889, it is the brightest galaxy in a spreading cloud of thousands of galaxies. This cloud is located 336 million light-years from the constellation Coma Berenices. This black hole is so big that our entire solar system would fit there about a dozen times.
4. Milky Way
100,000-120,000 light years in diameter 
The Milky Way is a closed spiral galaxy with a diameter of 100,000-120,000 light years and containing 200-400 billion stars. It can contain at least as many planets, 10 billion of which can orbit in the habitable zone of its parent stars.
3. El Gordo "El Gordo"
Largest galaxy cluster (2 × 1015 solar masses) 
El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light-years from Earth, which means that it has been observed since birth. According to scientists involved in the study, this cluster of galaxies is the most massive, hottest and emitting more X-rays than any other known cluster at this distance or even further.
The central galaxy in the middle of El Gordo is unusually bright and has amazing blue beams at optical wavelengths. The authors believe that this extreme galaxy was formed as a result of the collision and merger of two galaxies at the center of each cluster.
Using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and optical images, it has been estimated that about 1% of the cluster's mass is occupied by stars, while the rest is hot gas filling the gaps between stars and discernible by the Chandra telescope. This gas-to-star ratio is consistent with results from other massive clusters.
2. Universe
Estimated size 156 billion light years 
A picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this one and try to imagine / understand how big our Universe is. The mind-blowing numbers are listed below. Here is a link to the full-size image.
Earth 1.27 × 104 km
Sun 1.39 × 106 km
Solar System 2.99 × 1010 km or 0.0032 light years
Solar interstellar space 6.17 × 1014 km or 65 light years
Milky Way 1.51 × 1018 km or 160, .00 light years
Local Group of Galaxies 3.1 × 1019 km or 6.5 million light years
Local Supercluster 1.2 × 1021 km or 130 million light years
Universe 1.5 × 1024 km or 156 billion light years (but no one knows for sure)
1. Multiverse
Imagine not one, but many universes existing at the same time. The multiverse (or meta-universe) is a hypothetical set of many possible universes (including the historical universe in which we exist). Together they form everything that exists and can exist: the commonality of space, time, matter and energy, as well as physical laws and constants that describe them. But, again, there is no proof of the existence of a multiverse, so it may well be that our universe is the largest.
This could be a galactic wall billions of light years from Earth.
The supercluster of 830 galaxies located at a distance of 4.5-6.4 billion light years from the solar system was discovered by an international team of scientists, which included representatives of the UK, Spain, the United States and Estonia. Astrophysicists suggest that the galactic wall they discovered is the largest object in the universe known to date.
The Milky Way is part of a supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea, whose center of gravity is located in a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor. Until now, only a group of galaxies called the Sloan Great Wall could compete with it in size. However, the new object, discovered using the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) database, claims an absolute record. It is assumed that its mass is about 10 thousand times greater than that of the Milky Way, New Scientist reports.
As some researchers note, today the question of what exactly can be considered a "cosmic object" and how to determine its boundaries if we are talking about a set of galaxies remains largely debatable. The criterion could be considered the simultaneous movement of all galaxies included in the supercluster in outer space, however, it is not possible to verify this from such a huge distance at the current level of technology development.
It is also noted that there are potential competitors at the BOSS galactic wall, which claims to be the largest object in the Universe. Some researchers pay attention to the clusters of quasars, which look as if the quasars in them represent a certain system. However, if a connection between them really exists, it is impossible to explain such a structure from the point of view of modern cosmological theories, therefore the BOSS galactic wall is a more "realistic" candidate, experts say.
The Universe around us is huge and there are a lot of huge things in it. Planets, stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters - this is a row that can be continued in the direction of increasing size and mass, and at each point of this row you can find your record holder.
Here you will learn about some of the champions in various space "categories", each of which is a demonstration of the universe's ability to produce objects of incredible size and magnificence.
Largest exoplanet: GQ Lupi b
For some time after the discovery of GQ Lupi b in 2005, astronomers did not know what exactly this object really was. It revolves around a huge young star in an orbit that is two and a half times the diameter from the Sun to Pluto. At first, scientists assumed that this is a brown dwarf, which is a small "unlit" star. But subsequent observations showed that GQ Lupi b is a planet 3.5 times the diameter of Jupiter. And that makes GQ Lupi b the largest exoplanet known to humans today.
Biggest Star: UY Scuti
UY Scuti is a hypergiant star with a radius 1,700 times that of the Sun, making it the largest star in the universe we have studied. If the star UY Scuti were in the center of the solar system, its boundary would pass somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and the streams of gas and dust erupting from the surface would extend beyond Pluto's orbit to a distance exceeding the distance from the Earth to the Sun 400 times.
Largest nebula: Tarantula Nebula
The Tarantula Nebula is the largest known nebula and is the region with the most active formation of young stars. The nebula spans 1,800 light years at its longest. This object, also known as 30 Doradus, is located 170 thousand light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, in a small galaxy that is a satellite of the Milky Way.
Largest Empty Space: Supervoid Eridani
In 2004, astronomers noticed a huge blank space in maps based on data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, which measured the microwave background (cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang) with high sensitivity and resolution. This void covers an area of 1.8 billion light years, and its space is completely devoid of stars, gas, dust and, it seems, even dark matter.
Largest galaxy: IC 1101
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly 100,000 light-years across, which is a fairly average size among all spiral galaxies. And the largest known galaxy 1101 IC is 50 times larger and 2 thousand times more massive than the Milky Way. Galaxy 1101 IC measures 5.5 million light-years across, and if placed in the place of the Milky Way, its edge would reach our nearest neighbor on this scale, the Andromeda galaxy.
Largest black hole: TON 618
Supermassive black holes located in the central regions of large galaxies can have masses that exceed the mass of the Sun by many millions of times. But the largest black hole, TON 618, has a mass 66 billion times that of the Sun. It, this black hole, appeared in the Universe in the earliest period of its existence, and now it activates one of the brightest quasars that radiate into space just an insane amount of energy in the form of radiation of various types.
Largest Galactic Bubbles: Fermi Bubbles
In 2010, astronomers working with the Fermi space telescope discovered colossal structures that emerged from the depths of the Milky Way. These massive cosmic "blobs" are visible only at certain wavelengths of light, and are about 25,000 light-years across, or a quarter of the size of our galaxy. As scientists suggest, these bubbles are the consequences of the "very stormy feast" of our central black hole, its huge "energy burp".
Largest Object: Protocluster SPT2349-56
In the very distant past, when the age of the Universe was a tenth of its present age, 14 galaxies approached each other and, under the influence of gravitational forces, began to collide, forming the SPT2349-56 protocluster. The matter of all these galaxies is packed very tightly in space, the volume occupied by the protocluster is only three times the size of the Milky Way. And in the very distant future, all this accumulation of matter will form a new solid supergalaxy, the mass of which will be 10 trillion solar masses. After this happens, the central super galaxy and 50 of its satellite galaxies will form a giant object called a galaxy cluster.
Largest cluster of galaxies: Shapley supercluster
In the 1930s, this colossal structure was discovered by astronomer Harlow Shapley. It includes about 8 thousand galaxies, the total mass of which exceeds the mass of the Sun by 10 million billion times. It is the Shapley supercluster that is the largest single structure in the known part of the Universe, according to the European Space Agency.
Largest super cluster: Laniakea super cluster
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a member of a huge cluster of galaxies known as the Laniakea supercluster. This cluster has no formal boundaries and astronomers estimate that it includes more than 100 thousand galaxies. Supercluster Laniakea spans over 520 million light years, and the total mass of all its matter exceeds the mass of the Sun by 100 million billion times.
Largest cluster of quasars: Huge-LQG
Super-bright space objects powered by black holes, known as quasars, are already huge in themselves and contain entire oceans of energy. But sometimes several quasars can join together to form a cluster held by the gravitational forces of black holes. And the largest of these clusters of quasars is the Huge-LQG (Huge Large Quasar Group), which is 4 billion light years across. It contains 73 quasars, the total mass of which exceeds the mass of the Sun by 6.1 quintillion (1 with 18 zeros) times.
Biggest Thing in the Universe: Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall
By mapping the location of the sources of gamma-ray bursts, powerful cosmic explosions that complete the life cycle of stars, astronomers have discovered what is the largest object in space - the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. This object is 10 billion light-years across and contains billions of galaxies. This "Great Wall" was discovered in 2013, when astronomers found that virtually all gamma-ray bursts are concentrated in an area 10 billion light-years in size towards the constellations Hercules and Corona Borealis.
https://www.livescience.com/largest-objects-in-universe.html
This is a copy of the article located at
Thanks to the constant advancement of technology, astronomers are finding more and more diverse objects in the universe. The title of "the largest object in the Universe" moves from one structure to another almost every year. Here are examples of the largest objects that have been discovered so far.
1. Supervoid
In 2004, astronomers discovered the largest void (called a void) in the known universe. It is located at a distance of 3 billion light years from Earth in the southern part of the constellation Eridani. Despite the name "void," the 1.8 billion light-year void is not actually a completely empty region in space. It differs from other parts of the Universe in that the density of matter in it is 30 percent less (in other words, there are fewer stars and clusters in the void).
Also, the Eridani Supervoid is notable for the fact that in this region of the Universe, the temperature of microwave radiation is 70 microkelvin less than in the surrounding space (where it is approximately 2.7 kelvin).
2. Space blot
In 2006, a team of astronomers from the University of Toulouse found a mysterious green blob in space that became the largest structure in the universe at the time. Dubbed the Lyman-Alpha Drop, this droplet is a gigantic mass of gas, dust and galaxies that has spread out over 200 million light-years across (7 times the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way). The light from it reaches the Earth for 11.5 billion years. Considering that the age of the universe is most often estimated at 13.7 billion years, the giant green droplet is considered one of the oldest structures in the universe.
3. Shapley Supercluster
Scientists have long known that our galaxy is moving in the direction of the constellation Centaurus at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour, but the reason for the movement remained a mystery. About 30 years ago, a theory emerged according to which the Milky Way attracts the "Great Attractor" - an object whose gravity is strong enough to pull our galaxy over a huge distance. As a result, it was discovered that our Milky Way and the entire Local Group of galaxies are attracted to the so-called Shapley Supercluster, which consists of more than 8000 galaxies with a total mass of 10,000 times the Milky Way.
4. Great Wall CfA2
Like many of the structures on this list, the Great Wall of CfA2 was recognized as the largest known object in the universe when discovered. The object is located about 200 million light years from Earth, and its approximate dimensions are 500 million light years long, 300 million light years wide and 15 million light years thick. The exact dimensions are impossible to establish, since the clouds of dust and gas from the Milky Way block part of the Great Wall from us.
5. Laniakeya
Galaxies are usually grouped into clusters. Those regions where clusters are more densely packed and connected to each other by gravitational forces are called superclusters. It was once thought that the Milky Way, along with the Local Group of Galaxies, is part of the Virgo Supercluster (110 million light years across), but new research has shown that our region is just an arm of a much larger supercluster called Laniakea, which spans 520 million light years. years old.
6. Sloan's Great Wall
Sloan's Great Wall was first discovered in 2003. The giant group of galaxies spanning 1.4 billion light years held the title of the largest structure in the universe until 2013. It is located approximately 1.2 billion light years from Earth.
7. Huge-LQG
Quasars are the nuclei of active galaxies, in the center of which (as suggested by modern scientists) there is a supermassive black hole, which throws out part of the captured matter in the form of a bright jet of matter, which leads to super-powerful radiation. Currently, the third largest structure in the Universe is the Huge-LQG - a cluster of 73 quasars (and, accordingly, galaxies), located at a distance of 8.73 billion light years from Earth. Huge-LQG is 4 billion light years across.
8. A giant ring of gamma-ray bursts
Hungarian astronomers have discovered at a distance of 7 billion light-years from Earth one of the largest structures in the Universe - a giant ring formed by bursts of gamma radiation. Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest objects in the universe because they release as much energy in just a few seconds as the sun does in 10 billion years. The discovered ring is 5 billion light years in diameter.
9. Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Crown
Currently, the largest structure in the Universe is a superstructure of galaxies called the Great Wall of Hercules-Northern Crown. Its dimensions are 10 billion, or 10 percent of the diameter of the observable universe. The structure was discovered through observations of gamma-ray bursts in the region of the constellations Hercules and the Northern Crown, in a region 10 billion light-years distant from Earth.
10. Cosmic web
Scientists believe that the distribution of matter in the universe is not random. It has been suggested that galaxies are organized into a huge universal structure in the form of filamentary filaments or clusters of "partitions" between huge voids. Geometrically, the structure of the Universe most resembles a bubble mass or honeycomb. Inside the honeycomb, which is about 100 million light-years across, there are virtually no stars or matter of any kind. This structure has been called the "Space Web".
It may seem incredible, but cosmic discoveries directly affect the everyday life of people. Confirmation of this.
