The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

What are the largest structures in the universe?

2021-08-02T14:28:09.717Z


Superclusters of galaxies are groupings of hundreds of galaxies that interact gravitationally The galaxy Messier 100 or M100 is one of the 110 objects cataloged by Charles Messier (1730-1817). Galaxies are called by astronomers the "bricks of the Universe", since they are grouped into "hierarchical" groups, each one with more members than the previous one, such as clusters, and superclusters, which form the large-scale structure. of the Universe, European Southern Observatory The largest


The galaxy Messier 100 or M100 is one of the 110 objects cataloged by Charles Messier (1730-1817).

Galaxies are called by astronomers the "bricks of the Universe", since they are grouped into "hierarchical" groups, each one with more members than the previous one, such as clusters, and superclusters, which form the large-scale structure. of the Universe, European Southern Observatory

The largest structures in the universe are superclusters of galaxies, groupings of hundreds of galaxies that interact gravitationally. For you to fully understand the dimension of what we are talking about, I will tell you that a galaxy is a grouping of stars, gas and cosmic dust that are held together by the gravitational attraction between them and, above all, by dark matter. In a galaxy there can be billions of stars, the dwarfs have around 107 and the giants can have 1,014 (which would be respectively 100 million in the first case and 1,000 trillion in the second). The groups of galaxies that are close together form what are called clusters, which are sets of these structures also held together by gravity. It is estimated that a cluster can contain between 50 and 1,000 galaxies.The superclusters I was talking about at the beginning are groupings of galaxy clusters in which there may also be some isolated galaxies.

More information

  • Sarasvati, one of the largest structures in the universe

The best known supercluster is called the Great Wall of Sloan and it was discovered in 2003. Sloan refers to the telescope with which it was observed and which is in the United States, but in which people from all over the world work, in fact I participated in this international collaboration for several years. The Great Wall of Sloan measures 1.3 x 1025, this is slightly less than a Gigaparsec. As in astronomy the dimensions are so huge we cannot work with meters and we use other types of units which are the parsec (and kiloparsec, megaparsec and gigaparsec). One parsec equals approximately 30.9 trillion kilometers. So you can get an idea of ​​the dimensions we are talking about. I can give you an example for reference:The number of times the distance between the Earth and the Sun fits on the Sloan Great Wall is the same by which the size of the coronavirus that causes covid-19 would have to be multiplied to make it the size of the Earth.

In fact, the entire observable universe is equivalent to having 60 Great Walls of Sloan.

Before this structure, another similar to the one called the Great Wall of the CfA had been discovered and which is also a grouping of a lot of galaxies.

As the Sloan telescope has continued to map the sky, it has found even larger structures.

The last one was discovered in 2016 and is called the BOSS Great Wall.

In mass, this structure is about 10,000 times our galaxy, the Milky Way, and groups about a thousand visible galaxies.

The way we see the distribution of galaxies on very large scales in the universe is like a spider web

Telescopes that come in the future like the Vera Rubin or the DESI (spesctroscopic instrument for detecting dark energy, for its acronym in English), in which I am also involved, are going to map deeper so maybe they will find superclusters of this type still bigger.

The way we see the distribution of galaxies on very large scales in the universe is like a spider web. There are areas where there are more threads, there are pieces where there are no threads and areas where there is only one thread of the fabric. If you look at images of the cosmic spider web it is quite similar to this, there are areas where many of these threads intersect, which in astronomy we call filaments. When several filaments cross is when we have the clusters. The structures that I have told you about, which as I was saying are superclusters, are like several nodes of filaments in a row. In the universe there are areas that are almost empty and then we find other areas where you have a lot of galaxies together. But these huge structures that we are talking about are rare. Namely,there is more mass distributed in filaments and areas where there is only one node than in these things where there are a lot of nodes together.

The Local Supercluster, whose center is located in the Virgo cluster.

Each galaxy is indicated by a dot.

The extent of this mapping is approximately 293 x 163 million light years BRENT TULLY (UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII)

The Milky Way is in the Local Group which is a small grouping of galaxies that does not become a cluster.

And there are studies that say that our group is on the fringes of a vacuum, although this statement is not fully accepted by the scientific community.

As for structures larger than these great walls, it is possible that large gas structures can be found, but it is physically difficult and this type of research is now beginning its journey.

Violeta González Pérez

is a researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Fundamental Physics (CIAFF) of the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Question sent via email by

Martín Gartziandia

Coordination and writing:

Victoria Toro

We Respond

is a weekly scientific consultation, sponsored by the

Dr. Antoni Esteve Foundation

and the

L'Oréal-Unesco 'For Women in Science' program

, which answers readers' questions about science and technology.

They are scientists and technologists, members of

AMIT (Association of Women Researchers and Technologists)

, who answer these questions.

Send your questions to

nosotrasrespondemos@gmail.com

or via Twitter #nosotrasrespondemos.

You can follow

MATERIA

on

Facebook

,

Twitter

and

Instagram

, or sign up here to receive

our weekly newsletter

.

.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-02

You may like

News/Politics 2024-01-30T14:30:06.413Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.