Astronomers discover the biggest object in the Universe so far – the BOSS Great Wall

As if staring up at the night sky didn’t make us feel small already, astronomers have recently announced the discovery of the BOSS Great Wall, a group of superclusters that span roughly 1 billion light-years across and represents the largest structure ever found in space.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

Astronomers discover the biggest object in the Universe so far – the BOSS Great Wall

As if staring up at the night sky didn’t make us feel small already, astronomers have recently announced the discovery of the BOSS Great Wall, a group of superclusters that span roughly 1 billion light-years across and represents the largest structure ever found in space.

The BOSS Great Wall, which sounds aptly named for its size but actually stands for the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is a string of superclusters connected by gases lying roughly 4.5 to 6.5 billion light-years away from Earth. Thanks to gravity, these superclusters stay connected and swirl together through the void of space.

So, bigger than the Shapley supercluster then. “The Shapley Supercluster is the largest concentration of galaxies in our nearby universe that forms a gravitationally interacting unit, thereby pulling itself together instead of expanding with the universe. It appears as a striking overdensity in the distribution of galaxies in the constellation of Centaurus. It is 650 million light years away (z=0.046).”

Honestly, if a string of superclusters is to be found in any astronomical project, then BOSS is the project in which it should be found.

From Wiki,
“The BOSS Great Wall is a galaxy wall discovered in 2016. It is the largest known galaxy wall, containing perhaps 10 000 times the mass of the Milky Way. It is 1 billion light years across, and contains 830 galaxies that we can see, as well as many others that are too dim to be seen. It contains five times as many galaxies as an average piece of space of the same size. Its redshift is about z=0.47 ≈ 6800 million light years. It was discovered using the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, whence its name, by H. Lietzen et al.”

Technical article at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.08498v1.pdf

This isn’t so much a “wall” as a ring. See Figure 4.

(For fun, if we leave supercluster D off then it looks like a question mark).