Posted on 02/23/2025 5:41:41 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
Astronomers have discovered what may be the largest-scale structure in the known universe — a group of galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters that spans roughly 1.3 billion light-years across and contains a mind-boggling 200 quadrillion solar masses.
The newfound structure is dubbed Quipu after an Incan system of counting and storing numbers using knots on cords.
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The structures reported in the new study were all detected between roughly 425 million and 815 million light-years from Earth. Prior studies suggest that even larger structures exist deeper into the cosmos. The current contender for the largest structure in the universe is the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall, a mysterious concentration of matter located roughly 10 billion light-years from Earth, and spanning an estimated 10 billion light-years across. However, the Great Wall's existence remains disputed.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
That’s QUITE the ‘cluster’ ya got there, Mister! ;)
Are we talking Chris Christie big?
But not to scale though, since MW is only 100,000 light years across and the whole universe is about 15B light years across.
Maybe it’s just happy to see Mae West.
To make distances like this picturable in my head I think of multiples of our galaxy’s diameter. If my math is correct this 1.3B lyrs is 13,000 milkyways away.
(our galaxy is 100,000 lyrs wide, 1000 lyrs thick, and the central bulge is 10,000 lyrs thick)
oops. The center of this thing is 425M lyrs away, so if I didn’t screw up the math again the center is 4250 milkyways from us.
That doesn’t sound very far away.
Until they find one bigger.
“Wow! That’s a monster!”
Yeah, try not to piss it off.
This shows we are circling a drain.
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