BOSS, the largest structure in the universe to date. video

We’re talking about a billion light-years-long wall of galaxies (called the BOSS), which is larger than anything yet identified in the universe.

The English language has some limitations. One is to describe size: words like “big,” “huge,” and “enormous” are not enough to describe the objects astronomers discover in deep space. There are certainly no words to describe their nickname discovery Boss Great Wall (BGW), a massive cluster of galaxies more than a billion light-years in diameter, making it the largest structure ever observed in the universe. BOSS is named after the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, an international effort to map galaxies and galaxies Quasars In the primitive universe.

Some details

Big BOSS. Really great. huge. So large that when a star is born on one side of the BOSS, it takes a billion years for light to reach the other side. It consists of four giant clusters containing 830 galaxies connected by huge filaments of hot gas and protruding into space about 5 billion light-years from Earth. This creates a twisted structure resembling a cosmic honeycomb. As far as our area is concerned, the largest group is Laniakia giant group, which includes our Milky Way Galaxy, is less than half the BGW. Researchers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (the BOSS survey is one of its projects) sought to map this network to better understand the history, size, and expansion rate of the universe. Using a custom telescope located in New Mexico’s remote Sunspot Desert, they scanned vast swaths of the sky in search of distant galaxies, bright quasars and other celestial objects. In the process, they found some objects whose size certainly does not go unnoticed, such as “Great Wall SloanBOSS is ten times larger in size than Sloan and approximately 70% larger in diameter.

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The importance of discovering BOSS

Not all scientists are convinced that BOSS is really the largest. The universe is massive and ever-expanding, and in fact the BGW is so large that some scientists wonder if it can really be considered one thing. “I don’t quite understand why you tie all these properties together to define it as one structure” (Alison Coyle, University of California, San Diego). However, it is not the size of the wall that is important; Superclusters and cosmic walls like BOSS and Sloan help researchers model the physics of the Big Bang and map the shape of the universe. And if this is the pace of the search… BOSS is unlikely to retain its priority for much longer!

source: Washington Post, smithsonianmag.com, aanda.com