Scientists Intrigued by Galactic Structure That's 1.4 Billion Light-Years Wide
The team, led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, made the discovery after analyzing data as part of the ROSAT X-ray satellite sky survey.
They found that the structure — dubbed "Quipu" after strings with knots used by the Incas for bookkeeping — stretched across huge swathes of the night sky. The team believes it's largely composed of dark matter, the invisible substance believed to account for 85 percent of all mass in the universe.
The finding could have considerable implications for our understanding of the larger structures lurking in the universe and how to accurately map them.
"If you look at the distribution of the galaxy clusters in the sky in a spherical shell with a distance of 416 to 826 million light-years, you immediately notice a huge structure that stretches from high northern latitudes to almost the southern end of the sky," said project lead and Max Planck Institute associate professor Hans Böhringer in a statement.
Quipu's immense length appears to break the previous record set by the "Sloan Great Wall," which stretches around 1.1 billion light years in a much more distant part of the universe.
But as Live Science points out, there might be even larger structures still, such as the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall, a superstructure that spans an estimated 10 billion light-years across, another 10 billion light-years from Earth. Whether it indeed exists, however, remains a topic of contention among scientists.
For their latest study, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Max Planck team analyzed an expansive catalogue of galaxy clusters, which was created using data collected by the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics' ROSAT X-ray satellite in 1990.
Apart from Quipu, the team also discovered three other superstructures they're calling the Serpens-Corona Borealis, the Hercules, and the Sculptor-Pegasus.
In addition to Quipu and the Shapley supercluster, a concentration of galaxies in our nearby universe, the five structures contain an estimated 25 percent of all the matter in the observable universe, according to the researchers, or 13 percent of its volume.
The team argued in its paper that the findings could be "important for astrophysical research," such as the "study of the environmental dependence of galaxy evolution as well as for precision tests of cosmological models."
The researchers also suggest these superstructures won't stick around forever.
"In the future cosmic evolution, these superstructures are bound to break up into several collapsing units," they concluded in their paper. "They are thus transient configurations. But at present they are special physical entities with characteristic properties and special cosmic environments deserving special attention."
More on superstructures: Scientists Working to Explain "Superstructures" on Ocean Floor
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