This could be a galactic wall billions of light-years from Earth.
A supercluster of 830 galaxies located at a distance of 4.5-6.4 billion light years from the solar system was discovered by an international team of scientists, which included representatives from Great Britain, Spain, the USA and Estonia. Astrophysicists suggest that the galactic wall they discovered is the largest object in the universe known to date.
The Milky Way is part of a supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea, whose center of gravity is located in a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor. Until now, only a group of galaxies called the Great Wall of Sloan could compete with it in size. However, a new object discovered using the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) database claims to be an absolute record. It is estimated that its mass is about 10 thousand times greater than that of the Milky Way, reports New Scientist.
As some researchers note, today the question of what exactly can be considered a “space object” and how to determine its boundaries, if we are talking about a collection of galaxies, remains largely debatable. The criterion could be considered the simultaneous movement of all galaxies included in the supercluster in outer space, but it is not possible to check this from such a huge distance at the current level of technology development.
It is also noted that the BOSS galactic wall, which claims to be the largest object in the universe, has potential competitors. Some researchers pay attention to clusters of quasars, looking as if the quasars in them represent a certain system. However, if the connection between them really exists, explain similar structure from the point of view of modern cosmological theories is impossible, so the BOSS galactic wall is a more "realistic" candidate, experts say.
R136a1 is the most massive star known to date in the universe. Credit & Copyright: Joannie Dennis / flickr, CC BY-SA.
Looking at the night sky, you understand that you are just a grain of sand in the vast expanse of space.
But, many of us may also wonder: what is the most massive object known to date in the universe?
In a sense, the answer to this question depends on what we mean by the word "object". Astronomers observe structures such as the Great Wall of Hercules-Northern Corona, a colossal filament of gas, dust and dark matter containing billions of galaxies. Its length is about 10 billion light years, so this structure can be named after the largest object. But not everything is so simple. The classification of this cluster as a unique object is problematic due to the fact that it is difficult to determine exactly where it begins and where it ends.
In fact, in physics and astrophysics, “object” is well defined, said Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax:
“It is something that is bound together by its own gravitational forces, such as a planet, a star, or stars revolving around a common center of mass.
Using this definition it becomes a little easier to understand what is the most massive object in the universe. In addition, this definition can be applied to various objects depending on the scale under consideration.
A photo north pole Jupiter taken by Pioneer 11 in 1974. Credit & Copyright: NASA Ames. To our relatively tiny species, the planet Earth, at 6 septillion kilograms, seems huge. But it's not even the largest planet in the solar system. Gas giants: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter are much larger. The mass of Jupiter, for example, is 1.9 octillion kilograms. Researchers have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars, including many that make our gas giants look small. Discovered in 2016, HR2562 b is the most massive exoplanet, about 30 times more massive than Jupiter. At this size, astronomers are not sure whether it should be considered a planet or classified as a dwarf star.
In this case, the stars can grow to enormous sizes. The most massive known star is R136a1, its mass is between 265 and 315 times the mass of our Sun (2 nonillion kilograms). Located 130,000 light-years away from the Large Magellanic Cloud, our satellite galaxy, this star is so bright that the light it emits actually tears it apart. According to a 2010 study electromagnetic radiation, emanating from a star so powerful that it can carry away material from its surface, causing the star to lose about 16 Earth masses every year. Astronomers do not know exactly how such a star could form, and how long it will exist.
Enormous stars nestled in the stellar nursery RMC 136a in the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light-years away. Credit & Copyright: ESO / VLT. The next massive objects are galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across and contains about 200 billion stars, totaling about 1.7 trillion solar masses. However, the Milky Way cannot compete with the central galaxy of the Phoenix Cluster, located 2.2 million light years away and containing about 3 trillion stars. At the center of this galaxy is a supermassive black hole- the largest ever discovered - with an approximate mass of 20 billion suns. The Phoenix Cluster itself is a huge cluster of about 1000 galaxies with a total mass of about 2 quadrillion suns.
But even this cluster cannot compete with what is probably the most massive object ever discovered: the galactic protocluster known as SPT2349.
“We hit the jackpot by finding this structure,” said Chapman, leader of the team that discovered the new record holder. “More than 14 very massive individual galaxies located in space not much larger than our own Milky Way.”
An artist's illustration showing 14 galaxies that are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive cluster of galaxies. Credit & Copyright: NRAO / AUI / NSF; S. Dagnello. This cluster began to form when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old. The individual galaxies in this cluster will eventually coalesce into one giant galaxy, the most massive in the universe. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, Chapman said. Further observations showed that general structure contains about 50 satellite galaxies, which in the future will be absorbed by the central galaxy. The previous record holder, known as the El Gordo Cluster, has a mass of 3 quadrillion suns, but SPT2349 likely outweighs that by at least four to five times.
That such a huge object could have formed when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old surprised astronomers, because computer models suggested that it would take much longer for such large objects to form.
Given that humans have only explored a small portion of the sky, it is likely that even more massive objects could lurk far out in the universe.
The science
Of course, the oceans are vast, and the mountains are incredibly high. What's more, the 7 billion people that Earth is home to is also incredible. a large number of. But, living in this world, with a diameter of 12,742 kilometers, it is easy to forget that this is, in essence, a trifle for such a thing as space. When we look into the night sky, we realize that we are just a grain of sand in a vast infinite universe. We invite you to learn about the largest objects in space, the size of some of them is difficult for us to imagine.
1) Jupiter
The largest planet in the solar system (142,984 kilometers in diameter)
Jupiter is the largest planet in our star system. Ancient astronomers named this planet after Jupiter, the father of the Roman gods. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun. The planet's atmosphere is 84 percent hydrogen and 15 percent helium. Everything else is acetylene, ammonia, ethane, methane, phosphine and water vapor.
The mass of Jupiter is 318 times the mass of the Earth, and the diameter is 11 times greater. The mass of this giant is 70 percent of the mass of all the planets in the solar system. Jupiter's volume is large enough to contain 1,300 Earth-like planets. Jupiter has 63 known moons, but most of them are incredibly small and fuzzy.
2) Sun
The largest object in the solar system (1,391,980 kilometers in diameter)
Our Sun is a yellow dwarf star, the largest object in the star system in which we exist. The Sun contains 99.8 percent of the mass of this entire system, most of the rest of the mass is Jupiter. The Sun is currently 70 percent hydrogen and 28 percent helium, with the remaining matter accounting for just 2 percent of its mass.
Over time, the hydrogen in the Sun's core turns into helium. Conditions in the Sun's core, which is 25 percent of its diameter, are extreme. The temperature is 15.6 million Kelvin and the pressure is 250 billion atmospheres. The energy of the Sun is achieved through nuclear fusion reactions. Every second, approximately 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen are converted into 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons of energy in the form of gamma rays.
3) Our solar system
15*10 12 kilometers in diameter
Our solar system includes just one star, which is the central object, and nine major planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as well as many satellites, millions of solid asteroids and billions of icy comets.
4) Star VY Canis Major
The largest star in the universe (3 billion kilometers in diameter)
VY Big Dog It is the largest known star and one of the brightest stars in the sky. It is a red hypergiant located in the constellation Canis Major. The radius of this star is about 1800-2200 times greater than the radius of our Sun, its diameter is about 3 billion kilometers.
If this star were placed in our solar system, it would close the orbit of Saturn. Some astronomers believe that VY is actually smaller—about 600 times the size of the Sun—and therefore would only reach the orbit of Mars.
5) Huge deposits of water
Astronomers have discovered the largest and most massive reservoir of water ever found in the universe. The giant cloud, which is about 12 billion years old, contains 140 trillion times more water than contain all the oceans of the Earth combined.
A cloud of gaseous water surrounds a supermassive black hole located 12 billion light-years from Earth. This discovery shows that water has dominated the universe for almost its entire existence, the researchers said.
6) Extremely large and massive black holes
21 billion solar masses
Supermassive black holes are the largest black holes in the galaxy, weighing hundreds or even thousands of millions of solar masses. Most, if not all, galaxies, including the Milky Way, are believed to contain supermassive black holes at their centers.
One such monster, 21 million times the mass of the Sun, is an egg-shaped funnel of stars in the galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the stretched cloud of thousands of galaxies. The hole is located about 336 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. This black hole is so huge that it is 12 times larger than our solar system in diameter.
7) Milky Way
100-120 thousand light years in diameter
The Milky Way is a broken spiral galaxy that contains 200-400 billion stars. There are many planets revolving around each of these stars.
According to some estimates, 10 billion planets are in the habitable zone, revolving around their parent stars, that is, in zones where there are all conditions for the emergence of life like Earth.
8) El Gordo
The largest cluster of galaxies (2 * 10 15 solar masses)
El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light-years from Earth, so what we are seeing today is just an early stage of it. According to the researchers who have studied this galaxy cluster, it is the largest, hottest and emits the most radiation than any other known cluster at the same distance or further.
The central galaxy at the center of El Gordo is incredibly bright and has an unusual blue glow. The authors of the studies suggest that this extreme galaxy is the result of a collision and merger of two galaxies.
Using the Spitzer Space Telescope and optical imaging, scientists estimate that 1 percent of the cluster's total mass is stars, and the rest is hot gas that fills the space between the stars. This ratio of stars to gas is similar to the ratio in other massive clusters.
9) Our Universe
Size - 156 billion light years
Of course, no one could ever name the exact dimensions of the Universe, but, according to some estimates, its diameter is 1.5 * 10 24 kilometers. In general, it is difficult for us to imagine that there is an end somewhere, because the Universe includes incredibly gigantic objects:
Earth Diameter: 1.27*104km
Sun diameter: 1.39*106 km
Solar system: 2.99 * 10 10 km or 0.0032 sv. l.
Distance from the Sun to the nearest star: 4.5 sv. l.
Milky Way: 1.51*10 18 km or 160,000 sv. l.
Local group of galaxies: 3.1 * 10 19 km or 6.5 million sv. l.
Local supercluster: 1.2 * 10 21 km or 130 million sv. l.
10) Multiverse
One can try to imagine not one, but many Universes that exist at the same time. The Multiverse (or Multiple Universe) is a possible collection of many possible Universes, including our own, which together comprise everything that exists or can exist: the integrity of space, time, material matter and energy, and physical laws and the constants that describe it all.
However, the existence of other Universes besides ours has not been proven, so it is very likely that our Universe is the only one of its kind.
Surely everyone at least once in their life came across another list of natural wonders, which lists the highest mountain, the longest river, the driest and wettest regions of the Earth, and so on. Such records are impressive, but they are completely lost when compared with space records. We present you the five "most-most" space objects and phenomena described by New Scientist magazine.
The coldest
Everyone knows that it is very cold in space - but in reality this statement is not true. The concept of temperature makes sense only in the presence of matter, and space is practically empty space (stars, galaxies and even dust occupy a very small volume of it). So when researchers say that the temperature of outer space is about 3 kelvins (minus 270.15 degrees Celsius), they are talking about the average value for the so-called microwave background, or cosmic microwave background radiation - radiation that has survived from the time of the Big Bang.
And yet, there are many very cold objects in space. For example, the gas in the Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years away from the solar system, has a temperature of only one kelvin (minus 272.15 degrees Celsius). The nebula is expanding very rapidly - the gas that composes it is moving at a speed of about 164 kilometers per second, and this process leads to its cooling. Currently, the Boomerang Nebula is the only object known to scientists whose temperature is below the temperature of the CMB.
The solar system also has its record holders. In 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) found the coldest point in the vicinity of our star - it turned out that the extremely frosty place in the solar system is very close to Earth in one of the shadowed lunar craters. Compared to the cold of the Boomerang Nebula, 33 kelvins (minus 240.15 degrees Celsius) does not seem such an outstanding value, but if you remember that the lowest temperature recorded on Earth is only minus 89.2 degrees Celsius (this record was recorded at the Antarctic station "Vostok"), the attitude changes slightly. It is possible that with further study of the Moon, a new pole of cold will be found.
If we include in the concept of "space objects" devices created by people, then in this case the first place in the list of the coldest objects should be given to the orbital observatory "Planck", more precisely, to its detectors. With the help of liquid helium, they are cooled to an incredible 0.1 kelvin (minus 273.05 degrees Celsius). Extremely cold detectors are needed by "Planck" in order to study the same relic radiation - if the devices are warmer than the cosmic "background", then they simply will not be able to "detect" it.
Hottest
Warm temperature records are much more impressive than cold ones - if you can only run up to zero kelvins in the minus direction (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius, or absolute zero), then there is much more space in the plus direction. So, only the surface of our Sun - an ordinary yellow dwarf - warms up to 5.8 thousand kelvins (with the permission of the readers, the Celsius scale will be lowered in the future, since the "extra" 273.15 degrees in the final figure will not change the overall picture).
The surface of blue supergiants - young, extremely hot and bright stars - is an order of magnitude warmer than the surface of the Sun: on average, their temperature ranges from 30 to 50 thousand kelvins. Blue supergiants, in turn, are far behind white dwarfs - small, very dense stars, into which luminaries, whose mass is not enough to form a supernova, are believed to evolve. The temperature of these objects reaches 200 thousand kelvins. Supergiant class stars are some of the most massive in the universe, with masses up to 70 solar masses, can heat up to a billion kelvins, and the theoretical temperature limit for stars is about six billion kelvins.
However, this value is not an absolute record. Supernovae - stars that end their lives in an explosive process may exceed it for a short time. For example, in 1987, astronomers registered a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a modest galaxy located next to the Milky Way. A study of the neutrinos emitted by the supernova showed that the temperature in its "innards" was about 200 billion kelvins.
The same supernovae can also produce much hotter objects - namely, gamma-ray bursts. This term refers to gamma-ray emissions that occur in distant galaxies. It is believed that a gamma-ray burst is associated with the transformation of a star into a black hole (although the details of this process are still unclear) and may be accompanied by a heating of matter up to a trillion kelvins (a trillion is 10 12).
But this is not the limit. At the end of 2010, during experiments on the collision of lead ions at the Large Hadron Collider, a temperature of several trillion kelvins was recorded. The experiments at the LHC are designed to recreate the conditions that existed a few moments after the Big Bang, so indirectly this record can also be considered cosmic. As for the actual origin of the Universe, then, according to existing physical hypotheses, the temperature at that moment should have been written as a unit with 32 zeros.
The brightest
The SI unit of illuminance is lux, which characterizes the luminous flux incident on a unit surface. For example, the illumination of a table near a window on a clear day is about 100 lux. To characterize the light flux emitted by space objects, it is inconvenient to use lux - astronomers use the so-called stellar magnitude (a dimensionless unit that characterizes the energy of light quanta that has reached the instrument's detectors from the star - the logarithm of the ratio of the flux recorded from the star to some standard one).
With the naked eye in the sky, you can see a star named Alnilam, or Epsilon Orionis. This blue supergiant, 1.3 thousand light-years away from the Earth, is 400 thousand times more powerful than the Sun. The bright blue variable star Eta Carina overtakes our star in luminosity by five million times. The mass of Eta Carina is 100-150 solar masses, and for a long time this star was one of the heaviest stars known to astronomers. However, in 2010, in the RMC 136a star cluster, it was discovered that if you put the star RMC 136a1 on an imaginary scale, then 265 Suns will be required to balance it. The luminosity of the newly discovered "big man" is comparable to the luminosity of nine million Suns.
As in the case of temperature achievements, supernovae occupy the top lines in the list of brightness records. Outshine the brightest of them - an object called SN 2005ap - will be able to nine million Suns (more precisely, at least nine million and one).
But the absolute winners in this nomination are gamma-ray bursts. The average burst briefly "flares" with a brightness equal to that of 10 18 Suns. If we talk about stable sources of bright radiation, then in the first place will be quasars - the active nuclei of some galaxies, which are a black hole with matter falling on it. When heated, the matter emits radiation with a brightness of more than 30 trillion suns.
The fastest
All space objects are moving relative to each other at breakneck speed due to the expansion of the universe. According to the most commonly accepted estimate today, two arbitrary galaxies located at a distance of 100 megaparsecs are moving away from the Earth at a speed of 7-8 thousand kilometers per second.
But even if you do not take into account the general scattering, celestial bodies are very quickly passing by each other - for example, the Earth revolves around the Sun at a speed of about 30 kilometers per second, and the orbital speed of the fastest planet in the solar system, Mercury, is 48 kilometers per second.
In 1976, the man-made device Helios 2 surpassed Mercury and reached a speed of 70 kilometers per second (for comparison, Voyager 1, which recently reached the borders of the solar system, is moving at a speed of only 17 kilometers per second). And the planets of the solar system and research probes are far from comets - they rush past the star at a speed of about 600 kilometers per second.
The average star in a galaxy moves about 100 kilometers per second relative to the galactic center, but there are stars that move through their cosmic home ten times faster. Superfast luminaries often accelerate enough to overcome the gravitational pull of the galaxy and go on an independent journey through the universe. Unusual stars make up a very small part of all stars - for example, in the Milky Way, their proportion does not exceed 0.000001 percent.
A good speed is developed by pulsars - rotating neutron stars that remain after the collapse of "ordinary" luminaries. These objects can make up to a thousand revolutions around their axis per second - if an observer could be on the surface of the pulsar, he would move at a speed of up to 20 percent of the speed of light. And near rotating black holes, a wide variety of objects can be accelerated almost to the speed of light.
The biggest
It makes sense to talk about the size of space objects not in general, but breaking them into categories. For example, the largest planet in the solar system is Jupiter, but compared to the largest planets known to astronomers, this gas giant seems like a baby, or at least a teenager. For example, the diameter of the planet TrES-4 is 1.8 times the diameter of Jupiter. At the same time, the mass of TrES-4 is only 88 percent of the mass of the gas giant of the solar system - that is, the density of the strange planet is less than the density of the cork.
But TrES-4 ranks only second in size among the planets discovered to date (total) - WASP-17b is considered the champion. Its diameter is almost twice that of Jupiter, while its mass is only half that of Jupiter. While scientists do not know what chemical composition such "bloated" planets.
The largest star is the luminary with the name VY Canis Major. The diameter of this red supergiant is about three billion kilometers - if you lay out along the diameter VY of the Great Canis of the Sun, then they will fit from 1.8 thousand to 2.1 thousand pieces.
The largest galaxies are elliptical star clusters. Most astronomers believe that such galaxies are formed when two spiral star clusters collide, but just the other day a work appeared, the authors of which. But for now, the title of the largest galaxy remains with the object IC 1101, which belongs to the class of lenticular galaxies (an intermediate option between elliptical and spiral). To travel from one edge of IC 1101 to the other along its long axis, light has to travel as much as six million years. It runs through the Milky Way 60 times faster.
The size of the largest voids in space - the regions between galactic clusters, in which there are practically no celestial bodies, far exceeds the size of any objects. So, in 2009, this was found with a diameter of about 3.5 billion light years.
Compared with all these giants, the size of the largest man-made space object seems quite insignificant - the length, or rather the width of the International space station is only 109 meters.
Thanks to the constant development of technology, astronomers are finding more and more diverse objects in the universe. The title of "the largest object in the universe" passes from one structure to another almost every year. Here are examples of the largest objects that have been discovered so far.
1. Supervoid
In 2004, astronomers discovered the largest void (the so-called void) in the known universe. It is located at a distance of 3 billion light years from Earth in the southern part of the constellation Eridani. Despite the name "void", the 1.8 billion light-year void is not actually a completely empty region in space. Its difference from other parts of the Universe lies in the fact that the density of matter in it is 30 percent less (in other words, there are fewer stars and clusters in the entrance).
Also, the Eridanus Supervoid is notable for the fact that in this region of the Universe the temperature of microwave radiation is 70 microkelvins less than in the surrounding space (where it is approximately 2.7 kelvins).
2. Space blob
In 2006, a team of astronomers from the University of Toulouse found a mysterious green blob in space that became the largest structure in the universe at the time. This blob, dubbed the "Lyman-Alpha Blob", is a gigantic mass of gas, dust and galaxies that has "spread out" 200 million light-years across (that's 7 times the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way). Its light takes 11.5 billion years to reach Earth. Given that the age of the universe is most often estimated at 13.7 billion years, the giant green blob is considered one of the most ancient structures in the universe.
3. Shapley supercluster
Scientists have long known that our galaxy is moving towards the constellation Centaurus at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour, but the reason for the movement remained a mystery. About 30 years ago, a theory appeared that the Milky Way attracts the "Great Attractor" - an object whose gravity is strong enough to attract our galaxy by great distance. As a result, it was found that our Milky Way and the entire Local Group of galaxies are attracted to the so-called Shapley Supercluster, consisting of more than 8,000 galaxies with a total mass of 10,000 times the Milky Way.
4. Great Wall CfA2
Like many of the structures on this list, the CfA2 Great Wall was recognized as the largest known object in the universe when discovered. The object is about 200 million light-years from Earth, and its approximate dimensions are 500 million light-years long, 300 million wide and 15 million light-years thick. It is impossible to determine the exact dimensions, since clouds of dust and gas from the Milky Way block part of the Great Wall from us.
5. Laniakea
Galaxies are usually grouped into clusters. Those regions where clusters are more densely packed and connected to each other by gravitational forces are called superclusters. The Milky Way, along with the Local Group of galaxies, was once thought to be part of the 110 million light-year Virgo supercluster, but new research has shown that our region is just an arm of a much larger supercluster called Laniakea, which spans 520 million light-years. years.
6. The Great Wall of Sloan
The Great Wall of Sloan was first discovered in 2003. A giant group of galaxies spanning 1.4 billion light-years held the title of the largest structure in the universe until 2013. It is located approximately 1.2 billion light-years from Earth.
7. Huge-LQG
Quasars are the nuclei of active galaxies, in the center of which (as modern scientists assume) there is a supermassive black hole, which throws out part of the captured matter in the form of a bright jet of matter, which leads to super-powerful radiation. Currently, the third largest structure in the Universe is Huge-LQG - a cluster of 73 quasars (and, accordingly, galaxies), distant from Earth at a distance of 8.73 billion light years. Huge-LQG measures 4 billion light years.
8. Giant ring of gamma-ray bursts
Hungarian astronomers have discovered one of the largest structures in the universe at a distance of 7 billion light years from Earth - giant ring produced by bursts of gamma rays. Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest objects in the universe, releasing as much energy in just a few seconds as the Sun releases in 10 billion years. The diameter of the discovered ring is 5 billion light years.
9. Great Wall Hercules - North Crown
At present, the largest structure in the universe is a superstructure of galaxies called the "Great Wall of Hercules-Northern Corona". Its dimensions are 10 billion, or 10 percent of the diameter of the observable universe. The structure was discovered thanks to observations of gamma-ray bursts in the region of the constellations Hercules and the Northern Corona, in a region 10 billion light-years away from Earth.
10. Cosmic web
Scientists believe that the distribution of matter in the universe is not random. It has been suggested that galaxies are organized into a huge universal structure in the form of filamentous filaments or clusters of "barriers" between huge voids. Geometrically, the structure of the universe most closely resembles a bubbly mass or honeycomb. Inside the honeycombs, which are approximately 100 million light-years across, there are practically no stars or any matter. Such a structure was called the "Space Web".
It may seem incredible, but space discoveries directly affect everyday life of people. Confirmation of this.