The biggest thing ever found februari 2004

The Sloan Great Wall.

Recently discovered in Sloan Digital Sky Survey redshift data is the largest structure known in the universe. The "Sloan Great Wall" of galaxies is about 1 billion light-years away and sprawls for almost 1.4 billion light-years along the celestial equator, report J. Richard Gott III and Mario Juric (Princeton University) and their colleagues. It runs from roughly the head of Hydra to the feet of Virgo. The Sloan Great Wall is three times as distant and roughly twice as long as the famous Great Wall uncovered in 1989 by Margaret Geller and John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Althought unexpected, such a gigantic pattern is consistent with current theory about the growth of cosmis structure. Change arrangements this size turn up in about 10 percent of computer runs modeling the evolution of matter since the Big Bang in a volume of space this big. Says Gott, "It's a bit larger than we would have thought, but not embarassingly so."

© Govert Schilling
 

• Sloan Digital Sky Survey