The English language sometimes falls short when it comes to depicting size: terms like 'big', 'huge', or 'immense' barely scratch the surface when describing the cosmic objects astronomers are uncovering in the depths of space. Take the discovery of the BOSS Great Wall (BGW) for instance, a galaxy supercluster spanning over 1 billion light-years, tagging it as the largest observed structure in the cosmos to date. Named after the international Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey initiative, the BOSS's sheer size is beyond human comprehension.
Illustration of a supercluster system like the BOSS Great Wall. Credit: Volker Springel - Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics
Unveiling the BOSS
The BOSS is colossal, a gigantic entity, such that when a star forms on one end, its light takes a billion years to traverse to the other. It consists of four superclusters housing 830 galaxies, interwoven by enormous strands of heated gas, and is set against the backdrop of space around 5 billion light-years away from Earth. This forms a labyrinthine pattern, akin to a cosmic honeycomb. Compared to the BOSS, our region's largest cluster, the supercluster Laniakea, which encompasses our Milky Way, is less than half the size of the BGW. Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have been striving to map this network to gain deeper insights into the universe's history, size, and rate of expansion. Using a dedicated telescope in New Mexico's Sunspot desert, they scan vast sky portions for distant galaxies, luminous quasars, and other celestial bodies. In doing so, they've discovered objects of staggering size such as the "Great Sloan Wall." The BOSS dwarfs Sloan with a volume ten times larger and a diameter that's nearly 70% bigger.
Deciphering the significance of the BOSS
Despite the BOSS's impressive dimensions, not all scientists are convinced it's the largest. The universe is vast and ever-expanding, and some question whether the BGW, given its enormity, can be classified as a single structure. Allison Coil of the University of California, San Diego expresses, ''I don't quite understand why you link all these features together to call it one structure''. Regardless, the importance of the discovery lies not in the size but in the implications it has for our understanding of the universe. Superclusters and cosmic walls like the BOSS and Sloan aid researchers in modeling big bang physics and mapping the universe's shape. And given the rate of discovery, it's quite possible that the BOSS won't hold its record for much longer!
Source: Washingtonpost, smithsonianmag.com, aanda.com
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