Here’s the latest reminder that space is really, really big. At a cool billion light years across, a distant complex of galaxy superclusters may be the largest structure yet found in the cosmos.
Individual galaxies like our own Milky Way are bound together by gravity into clusters, and these clusters clump into superclusters. These can in turn link together into long lines of galaxies called walls. On the grandest scales, the universe resembles a cosmic web of matter surrounding empty voids – and these walls are the thickest threads.
In the nearby universe, we know of the Sloan Great Wall, and in 2014, the Milky Way was found to be part of a supercluster system called Laniakea. Both are enormous. But the newly spotted BOSS Great Wall, with a total mass perhaps 10,000 times as great as the Milky Way, is two-thirds bigger again than either of them.
To read more, click here.