What is the largest space object? Supercluster of galaxies. Andromeda Galaxy

The ancient pyramids, the tallest skyscraper in the world in Dubai, almost half a kilometer high, the grandiose Everest - just looking at these huge objects is breathtaking. And at the same time, compared to some objects in the universe, they are microscopic in size.

The largest asteroid

largest planet

The biggest star

The biggest black hole

largest galaxy

Shapley Supercluster

Huge-LQG group of quasars

space network

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. So far, scientists do not know what the chemical composition of such "bloated" planets is.

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.

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.

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, the electromagnetic radiation emanating from a star is so powerful that it can carry away material from its surface, causing the star to lose about 16 Earth masses each year. Astronomers do not know exactly how such a star could form, and how long it will exist.

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 estimated 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.”

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 the overall structure contains about 50 satellite galaxies, which will be absorbed by the central galaxy in the future. 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.

Thanks to the rapid development of technology, astronomers are making more and more interesting and incredible discoveries in the universe. For example, the title of "the largest object in the universe" passes from one find to another almost every year. Some open objects are so huge that they baffle even the best scientists of our planet with their existence. Let's talk about the ten largest of them.

SuperVoid

More recently, scientists have discovered the largest cold spot in the universe (at least known to the science of the universe). It is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. With its length of 1.8 billion light years, this spot baffles scientists, because they could not even imagine that such an object could really exist.

Despite the presence of the word “void” in the title (from the English “void” means “emptiness”), the space here is not completely empty. This region of space contains about 30 percent fewer clusters of galaxies than their surroundings. According to scientists, voids make up to 50 percent of the volume of the universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to super-strong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them. Two things make this void interesting: its unimaginable size and its relation to the mysterious cold relic spot WMAP.

Interestingly, the new discovered supervoid is now perceived by scientists as the best explanation for such a phenomenon as cold spots, or regions of outer space filled with cosmic relic (background) microwave radiation. Scientists have been arguing for a long time what these cold spots really are.

One proposed theory, for example, suggests that cold spots are the fingerprints of black holes in parallel universes, caused by quantum entanglement between universes.

However, many modern scientists are more inclined to believe that the appearance of these cold spots can be provoked by supervoids. This is explained by the fact that when protons pass through a void, they lose their energy and become weaker.

However, it is possible that the location of supervoids relatively close to the location of cold spots may be a mere coincidence. Scientists still have a lot of research to do on this and eventually find out whether the voids are the cause of the mysterious cold spots or their source is something else.

superblob

In 2006, the title of the largest object in the universe was given to the discovered mysterious cosmic “bubble” (or blob, as scientists usually call them). True, he retained this title for a short time. This 200-million-light-year-long bubble is a gigantic collection of gas, dust, and galaxies. With some caveats, this object looks like a giant green jellyfish. The object was discovered by Japanese astronomers when they were studying one of the regions of space known for the presence of a huge volume of cosmic gas. It was possible to find the blob thanks to the use of a special telescopic filter, which unexpectedly indicated the presence of this bubble.

Each of the three “tentacles” of this bubble contains galaxies that are four times denser between each other than is usual in the Universe. The cluster of galaxies and gas balls inside this bubble are called Liman-Alpha bubbles. It is believed that these objects were formed approximately 2 billion years after the Big Bang and are real relics of the ancient Universe. Scientists speculate that the blob itself formed when massive stars that existed in the early days of space suddenly went supernova and released a gigantic volume of gas. The object is so massive that scientists believe that it is, by and large, one of the first cosmic objects to form in the universe. According to theories, over time, more and more new galaxies will form from the accumulated gas here.

Shapley Supercluster

For many years, scientists have believed that our Milky Way galaxy is being pulled across the universe toward the constellation Centaurus at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour. Astronomers theorize that the reason for this is the Great Attractor, an object with such a force of gravity, which is already enough to attract entire galaxies to itself. True, scientists could not figure out what kind of object this was for a long time, since this object is located beyond the so-called "zone of avoidance" (ZOA), a region of the sky near the plane of the Milky Way, where the absorption of light by interstellar dust is so great that it is impossible to see what is behind it.

However, over time, X-ray astronomy came to the rescue, which developed strongly enough that it made it possible to look beyond the ZOA region and find out what is causing such a strong gravitational pool. All that scientists saw turned out to be an ordinary cluster of galaxies, which baffled scientists even more. These galaxies could not be the Great Attractor and could not have enough gravity to attract our Milky Way. This figure is only 44 percent of the required. However, as soon as scientists decided to look deeper into space, they soon discovered that the "great cosmic magnet" is a much larger object than previously thought. This object is the Shapley supercluster.

The Shapley Supercluster, which is a supermassive cluster of galaxies, is located behind the Great Attractor. It is so huge and has such a powerful attraction that it attracts both the Attractor itself and our own galaxy. The supercluster consists of more than 8,000 galaxies with a mass of more than 10 million Suns. Every galaxy in our region of space is currently being pulled by this supercluster.

Great Wall CfA2

Like most of the objects on this list, the Great Wall (also known as the CfA2 Great Wall) once also boasted the title of the largest known space object in the universe. It was discovered by American astrophysicist Margaret Joan Geller and John Peter Huchra while studying the redshift effect for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. According to scientists, it is 500 million light years long and 16 million light years wide. In its shape, it resembles the Great Wall of China. Hence the nickname he got.

The exact dimensions of the Great Wall are still a mystery to scientists. It could be much larger than thought, spanning 750 million light-years. The problem in determining the exact dimensions lies in its location. As in the case of the Shapley supercluster, the Great Wall is partially covered by the "zone of avoidance".

In general, this “zone of avoidance” does not allow us to see about 20 percent of the observable (reachable for current technologies) Universe, because dense accumulations of gas and dust (as well as a high concentration of stars) located inside the Milky Way greatly distort optical wavelengths. In order to see through the "zone of avoidance", astronomers have to use other types of waves, such as infrared, which can penetrate another 10 percent of the "zone of avoidance". Through which infrared waves cannot penetrate, radio waves, as well as near-infrared waves and X-rays, break through. However, the actual inability to see such a large region of space is somewhat frustrating for scientists. The "Zone of Avoidance" may contain information that could fill gaps in our knowledge of the cosmos.

Supercluster Laniakea

Galaxies are usually grouped together. These groups are called clusters. The regions of space where these clusters are more closely spaced are called superclusters. Previously, astronomers mapped these objects by determining their physical location in the universe, but recently a new way of mapping local space has been invented, shedding light on data previously unknown to astronomy.

The new principle of mapping the local space and the galaxies located in it is based not so much on the calculation of the physical location of the object, but on the measurement of the gravitational effect exerted by it. Thanks to the new method, the location of galaxies is determined and, on the basis of this, a map of the distribution of gravity in the Universe is compiled. Compared to the old ones, the new method is more advanced because it allows astronomers not only to mark new objects in the universe we see, but also to find new objects in places where it was not possible to look before. Since the method is based on measuring the level of impact of certain galaxies, and not on observing these galaxies, thanks to it we can even find objects that we cannot directly see.

The first results of the study of our local galaxies using the new research method have already been obtained. Scientists, based on the boundaries of the gravitational flow, mark a new supercluster. The importance of this study lies in the fact that it will allow us to better understand where our place in the universe is. The Milky Way was previously thought to be inside the Virgo supercluster, but a new method of investigation shows that this region is just an arm of the even larger Laniakea supercluster, one of the largest objects in the universe. It stretches for 520 million light years, and somewhere inside it we are.

Great Wall of Sloan

The Sloan Great Wall was first discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a scientific mapping of hundreds of millions of galaxies to determine the presence of the largest objects in the universe. Sloan's Great Wall is a gigantic galactic filament of multiple superclusters spread out across the universe like the tentacles of a giant octopus. At 1.4 billion light-years long, the "wall" was once thought to be the largest object in the universe.

The Great Wall of Sloan itself is not as well understood as the superclusters that lie within it. Some of these superclusters are interesting in their own right and deserve special mention. One, for example, has a core of galaxies that together look like giant tendrils from the side. Another supercluster has a very high level of interaction between galaxies, many of which are currently undergoing a merger.

The presence of the "wall" and any other larger objects creates new questions about the mysteries of the universe. Their existence goes against the cosmological principle, which theoretically limits how big objects in the universe can be. According to this principle, the laws of the universe do not allow the existence of objects larger than 1.2 billion light years. However, objects like the Great Wall of Sloan completely contradict this opinion.

Group of quasars Huge-LQG7

Quasars are high-energy astronomical objects located at the center of galaxies. It is believed that the center of quasars are supermassive black holes, which pull on the surrounding matter. This results in huge radiation, which is 1000 times more powerful than all the stars inside the galaxy. Currently, the third largest object in the universe is the Huge-LQG group of quasars, consisting of 73 quasars scattered over 4 billion light-years. Scientists believe that this massive group of quasars, as well as similar ones, are one of the main precursors and sources of the largest objects in the universe, such as, for example, Sloane's Great Wall.

The Huge-LQG group of quasars was discovered after analyzing the same data that discovered the Great Wall of Sloan. Scientists determined its presence after mapping one of the regions of space using a special algorithm that measures the density of quasars in a certain area.

It should be noted that the very existence of Huge-LQG is still a matter of controversy. While some scientists believe that this region of space does indeed represent a group of quasars, other scientists believe that the quasars within this region of space are located randomly and are not part of the same group.

Giant gamma ring

Stretching for 5 billion light-years, the Giant galactic gamma-ray ring (Giant GRB Ring) is the second largest object in the universe. In addition to its incredible size, this object attracts attention due to its unusual shape. Astronomers studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that are formed as a result of the death of massive stars) discovered a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were at the same distance from the Earth. These bursts formed a ring in the sky, 70 times the diameter of the full moon. Considering that gamma-ray bursts themselves are quite rare, the chance that they will form a similar shape in the sky is 1 in 20,000. This allowed scientists to believe that they are witnessing one of the largest objects in the universe.

By itself, "ring" is just a term to describe the visual representation of this phenomenon as seen from Earth. There are theories that the giant gamma-ray ring may be a projection of a sphere around which all gamma-ray bursts occurred in a relatively short period of time, about 250 million years. True, here the question arises as to what kind of source could create such a sphere. One explanation revolves around the possibility that galaxies may cluster around a huge concentration of dark matter. However, this is just a theory. Scientists still don't know how these structures form.

Great Wall of Hercules - North Corona

The largest object in the universe was also discovered by astronomers as part of their observation of gamma rays. This object, dubbed the Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Corona, spans 10 billion light-years, making it twice the size of the Giant Galactic Gamma Ring. Since the brightest bursts of gamma rays are produced by larger stars, usually located in areas of space where there is more matter, astronomers each time metaphorically see each such burst as a needle prick into something larger. When scientists discovered that there were too many gamma-ray bursts in the region of space towards the constellations Hercules and the Northern Corona, they determined that there was an astronomical object here, most likely a dense concentration of galaxy clusters and other matter.

An interesting fact: the name "The Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Crown" was coined by a Filipino teenager who wrote it down on Wikipedia (anyone who does not know can edit this electronic encyclopedia). Shortly after the news that astronomers had discovered a huge structure in the cosmic sky, a corresponding article appeared on the pages of Wikipedia. Despite the fact that the invented name does not quite accurately describe this object (the wall covers several constellations at once, and not just two), the world Internet quickly got used to it. Perhaps this is the first time that Wikipedia has given a name to a discovered and scientifically interesting object.

Since the very existence of this “wall” also contradicts the cosmological principle, scientists have to reconsider some of their theories about how the universe actually formed.

space web

Scientists believe that the expansion of the universe is not random. There are theories according to which all the galaxies of the cosmos are organized into one incredible structure, reminiscent of filamentous connections that unite dense regions. These filaments are scattered between less dense voids. Scientists call this structure the Cosmic Web.

According to scientists, the web formed at a very early stage in the history of the universe. The early stage of the formation of the web was unstable and heterogeneous, which subsequently helped the formation of everything that is now in the universe. It is believed that the "threads" of this web played a big role in the evolution of the Universe, thanks to which this evolution accelerated. The galaxies inside these filaments have a significantly higher star formation rate. In addition, these threads are a kind of bridge for gravitational interaction between galaxies. Once formed in these filaments, galaxies travel to galaxy clusters where they eventually die.

Only recently have scientists begun to understand what this Cosmic Web really is. Moreover, they even detected its presence in the radiation of the distant quasar they were studying. Quasars are known to be the brightest objects in the universe. The light of one of them went straight to one of the filaments, which heated up the gases in it and made them glow. Based on these observations, scientists have drawn threads between other galaxies, thus compiling a picture of the "skeleton of the cosmos."

1 light second ≈ 300,000 km;

1 light minute ≈ 18,000,000 km;

1 light hour ≈ 1,080,000,000 km;

1 light day ≈ 26,000,000,000 km;

1 light week ≈ 181,000,000,000 km;

1 light month ≈ 790,000,000,000 km.

The ancient pyramids, the tallest skyscraper in the world in Dubai, almost half a kilometer high, the grandiose Everest - just looking at these huge objects is breathtaking. And at the same time, compared to some objects in the universe, they are microscopic in size.

The largest asteroid

Today, Ceres is considered the largest asteroid in the universe: its mass is almost a third of the entire mass of the asteroid belt, and its diameter is over 1000 kilometers. The asteroid is so large that it is sometimes referred to as a "dwarf planet".

largest planet

The largest planet in the Universe is TrES-4. It was discovered in 2006 and is located in the constellation Hercules. A planet called TrES-4 orbits a star that is about 1,400 light-years away from planet Earth.

The planet TrES-4 itself is a ball that consists mainly of hydrogen. Its size is 20 times the size of the Earth. The researchers claim that the diameter of the discovered planet is almost 2 times (more precisely, 1.7) the diameter of Jupiter (it is the largest planet in the solar system). The temperature of TrES-4 is about 1260 degrees Celsius.

The biggest black hole

In terms of area, black holes are not that big. However, given their mass, these objects are the largest in the universe. And the largest black hole in space is a quasar, whose mass is 17 billion times (!) More than the mass of the Sun. This is a huge black hole at the very center of the galaxy NGC 1277, an object that is larger than the entire solar system - its mass is 14% of the total mass of the entire galaxy.

largest galaxy

The so-called "super galaxies" are several galaxies merged together and located in galactic "clusters", clusters of galaxies. The largest of these "super galaxies" is IC1101, which is 60 times the size of the galaxy that hosts our solar system. The length of IC1101 is 6 million light years. By comparison, the Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years across.

The largest star in the universe

VY Canis Majoris 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.

Huge deposits of water

Astronomers have discovered the largest and most massive reservoir of water ever found in the universe. The giant cloud, about 12 billion years old, contains 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans 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.

largest cluster of galaxies

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.

SuperVoid

More recently, scientists have discovered the largest cold spot in the universe (at least known to the science of the universe). It is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. With its length of 1.8 billion light years, this spot baffles scientists, because they could not even imagine that such an object could really exist.

Despite the presence of the word “void” in the title (from the English “void” means “emptiness”), the space here is not completely empty. This region of space contains about 30 percent fewer clusters of galaxies than their surroundings. According to scientists, voids make up to 50 percent of the volume of the universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to super-strong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them. Two things make this void interesting: its unimaginable size and its relation to the mysterious cold relic spot WMAP.

superblob

In 2006, the title of the largest object in the universe was given to the discovered mysterious cosmic “bubble” (or blob, as scientists usually call them). True, he retained this title for a short time. This 200-million-light-year-long bubble is a gigantic collection of gas, dust, and galaxies.

Each of the three "tentacles" of this bubble contains galaxies that are four times denser among themselves than is usual in the Universe. The cluster of galaxies and gas balls inside this bubble are called Liman-Alpha bubbles. It is believed that these objects were formed approximately 2 billion years after the Big Bang and are real relics of the ancient Universe.

Shapley Supercluster

For many years, scientists have believed that our Milky Way galaxy is being pulled across the universe toward the constellation Centaurus at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour. Astronomers theorize that the reason for this is the Great Attractor, an object with such a force of gravity, which is already enough to attract entire galaxies to itself. True, scientists could not figure out what kind of object this was for a long time, since this object is located beyond the so-called "zone of avoidance" (ZOA), a region of the sky near the plane of the Milky Way, where the absorption of light by interstellar dust is so great that it is impossible to see what is behind it.

As soon as scientists decided to look deeper into space, they soon discovered that the "great cosmic magnet" is a much larger object than previously thought. This object is the Shapley supercluster.

The Shapley Supercluster is a supermassive cluster of galaxies. It is so huge and has such a powerful attraction that our own galaxy. The supercluster consists of more than 8,000 galaxies with a mass of more than 10 million Suns. Every galaxy in our region of space is currently being pulled by this supercluster.

Supercluster Laniakea

Galaxies are usually grouped together. These groups are called clusters. The regions of space where these clusters are more closely spaced are called superclusters. Previously, astronomers mapped these objects by determining their physical location in the universe, but recently a new way of mapping local space has been invented, shedding light on data previously unknown to astronomy.

The new principle of mapping the local space and the galaxies located in it is based not so much on the calculation of the physical location of the object, but on the measurement of the gravitational effect exerted by it.

The first results of the study of our local galaxies using the new research method have already been obtained. Scientists, based on the boundaries of the gravitational flow, mark a new supercluster. The importance of this study lies in the fact that it will allow us to better understand where our place in the universe is. The Milky Way was previously thought to be inside the Virgo supercluster, but a new method of investigation shows that this region is just an arm of the even larger Laniakea supercluster, one of the largest objects in the universe. It stretches for 520 million light years, and somewhere inside it we are.

Great Wall of Sloan

The Sloan Great Wall was first discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a scientific mapping of hundreds of millions of galaxies to determine the presence of the largest objects in the universe. Sloan's Great Wall is a gigantic galactic filament of multiple superclusters spread out across the universe like the tentacles of a giant octopus. At 1.4 billion light-years long, the "wall" was once thought to be the largest object in the universe.

The Great Wall of Sloan itself is not as well understood as the superclusters that lie within it. Some of these superclusters are interesting in their own right and deserve special mention. One, for example, has a core of galaxies that together look like giant tendrils from the side. Another supercluster has a very high level of interaction between galaxies, many of which are currently undergoing a merger.

Group of quasars Huge-LQG7

Quasars are high-energy astronomical objects located at the center of galaxies. It is believed that the center of quasars are supermassive black holes, which pull on the surrounding matter. This results in huge radiation, which is 1000 times more powerful than all the stars inside the galaxy. Currently, the third largest object in the universe is the Huge-LQG group of quasars, consisting of 73 quasars scattered over 4 billion light-years. Scientists believe that this massive group of quasars, as well as similar ones, are one of the main precursors and sources of the largest objects in the universe, such as, for example, Sloane's Great Wall.

Giant gamma ring

Stretching for 5 billion light-years, the Giant galactic gamma-ray ring (Giant GRB Ring) is the second largest object in the universe. In addition to its incredible size, this object attracts attention due to its unusual shape. Astronomers studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that are formed as a result of the death of massive stars) discovered a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were at the same distance from the Earth. These bursts formed a ring in the sky, 70 times the diameter of the full moon.

Great Wall of Hercules - North Corona

The largest object in the universe was also discovered by astronomers as part of their observation of gamma rays. This object, dubbed the Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Corona, spans 10 billion light-years, making it twice the size of the Giant Galactic Gamma Ring. Since the brightest bursts of gamma rays are produced by larger stars, usually located in areas of space where there is more matter, astronomers each time metaphorically see each such burst as a needle prick into something larger. When scientists discovered that there were too many gamma-ray bursts in the region of space towards the constellations Hercules and the Northern Corona, they determined that there was an astronomical object here, most likely a dense concentration of galaxy clusters and other matter.

space web

Scientists believe that the expansion of the universe is not random. There are theories according to which all the galaxies of the cosmos are organized into one incredible structure, reminiscent of filamentous connections that unite dense regions. These filaments are scattered between less dense voids. Scientists call this structure the Cosmic Web.

According to scientists, the web formed at a very early stage in the history of the universe. The early stage of the formation of the web was unstable and heterogeneous, which subsequently helped the formation of everything that is now in the universe. It is believed that the "threads" of this web played a big role in the evolution of the Universe, thanks to which this evolution accelerated. The galaxies inside these filaments have a significantly higher star formation rate. In addition, these threads are a kind of bridge for gravitational interaction between galaxies. Once formed in these filaments, galaxies travel to galaxy clusters where they eventually die.

Only recently have scientists begun to understand what this Cosmic Web really is. Moreover, they even detected its presence in the radiation of the distant quasar they were studying. Quasars are known to be the brightest objects in the universe. The light of one of them went straight to one of the filaments, which heated up the gases in it and made them glow. Based on these observations, scientists have drawn threads between other galaxies, thus compiling a picture of the "skeleton of the cosmos."