Astronomers have used the Subaru and Keck telescopes to discover gigantic filaments of galaxies stretching across 200 million light-years in space. These filaments, formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang, are the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe. The filaments contain at least 30 huge concentrations of gas, each of which contains 10x the mass of the Milky Way.
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The newly found giant structure extends over 200 million light years and has a concentration of galaxies up to four times denser than the universe’s average. The only previous known structures with such a high density are much smaller, measuring about 50 million light-years in scale.
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Do any our resident particle physicists and cosmologists and others have a particular take on this? I can’t get a sense of the implications.
What was the background to this discovery? It can’t be a case of “Holy shit, Carl, you gotta see this, it’s humongous!”
Also, I know that the knee-bone-is-connected-to-the-ankle-bone in myriad and mysterious ways in the Universe. What makes this new Guinness record-holder (probably not official yet) a structure?
Well, yes, but, that is just how they looked 13, or so, billion years ago. They likely do not exist in the same form today and we have no way of knowing exactly what they evolved into.
That’s sort of the silver lining in looking that deep into space, as we can see objects as they were in the early universe, and use that as clues in building better cosmological models.
Yeh, but in all this infinite expanse of space and untold matter, such an insignificant amount of atoms and molecules became self-aware. Then typed the quoted, above.
And then disappeared an insignificant amount of time later, desperately trying to convince itself that its self-awareness counted for anything in a universe that was 99.9999999% incapable of caring.
By what measure? We can put whatever meaning we like on “count”, but it’s for sure the Universe doesn’t care, so all we’re doing is whistling to keep from being afraid of the dark.
Stuff like this makes my head hurt. So, the farthest things that we can see should be closer in time to the Big Bang, right? But, the nearer in time that you get to the Big Bang, the closer everything would have been together, right?
Wedgehead close, but no cigar. There’s a whole bunch of threads here on “close” in a space-time expansion of space-time. Don’t have the cites at the moment; just search “expanding sphere” and you can’t miss.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the long stringy filament structure, someone is peering into a telescope and proclaiming, “Wow, look at that teeny tiny blobby galaxy way the hell over there. I wonder if anyone lives there?”
