The atoms form stars, the stars are grouped into galaxies, the galaxies come together in groups, the groups join in clusters, which in turn are aligned in gigantic filaments, which form huge galactic walls and structures such as Laniakea and that, all together together , … They configure a global cosmic web in which everything seems to be connected … the universe in which we live is the result of an endless battle between two formidable forces: gravity, which tends to unite all things, and accelerated expansion, that makes space grow between them, separating them. Therefore, knowing as precisely as possible the way in which the subject is distributed in the universe is one of the greatest tasks facing astrophysics and cosmology.
On that path, scientists have already encountered some really huge structures in the distant universe, billions of light years away. And it is logical that it is so, because only that great distance allows us Galaxies, which measures, from extreme to extreme, around 750 million light years. Or even things even much bigger.
That, however, does not mean that there are also no similar structures. And now, a team of researchers led by Hans Böhringer, from the Max Planck Institute of extraterrestrial Physics, has just located the largest structure found so far in the nearby universe. The finding, which will be published soon in ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’, can already be consulted on the ‘Arxiv’ prepublic server.
Quipu’s ‘powers’
It is called Quipu, like the complicated system used by the Incas to count, and extends over 1.3 billion light years, a space in which they would fit, in an Indian row, up to 13,000 galaxies the size of our dairy road. Its enormous mass is equivalent to 2×1017 solar masses, that is, 130,000 times more than that of our own galaxy. But Quipu does not have a linear structure, but branched: a great main ‘thread’ formed by numerous groups of galaxies and from which numerous secondary threads’ leave.
With these credentials, Quipu becomes, in its own right, the largest of the five largest structures known in the nearby universe, where ‘close’ means an area between 424 and 815 million light years of the earth. Together, these five structures contain 45% and all groups of galaxies, 30% of all individual galaxies and up to a quarter of all the matter contained in that portion of universe, although they only occupy 13% of its volume , indicating the extraordinary density of matter that these structures have with respect to the rest of the region.
Which, on the other hand, is not surprising, because we know that all the subject of the universe is organized as an immense ‘cosmic web’, in which the filaments (rivers of light made of galaxies groups), converge in central nodes, of greater density, and are surrounded by immense gaps. In the distant universe, even greater structures have been found, even ‘impossible’ for current theories, such as the ‘giant arch’ of galaxies, discovered in 2021 and whose length is 3.3 billion light years, or the gigantic ‘galaxies ring ‘Observed in 2024 and whose diameter is 1.3 billion light years. Both structures, in fact, are so huge that they challenge the cosmological principle, one of the central axes of modern cosmology and according to which, at scales large enough (equal to or greater than 1.2 billion light years) the matter is distributed soft And evenly everywhere, so that the universe should be the same in all directions, with nothing that stands out on the rest.
Objects such as Quipu, however, fit with current models, and scientists try to find out if their presence, unknown until now, could somehow affect cosmological measurements and be, perhaps, a possible solution to one of the greater mysteries that science faces today: the famous hubble tension, the disagreement between different methods to estimate the expansion rate of the universe.
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