Scientists Discover Universe’s Largest Known Structure
Scientists have found the largest known structure in the universe, a cluster of galactic cores so vast it would take four billion years for a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light to cross it.
The sighting challenges a theory from Einstein which suggests such a massive object shouldn’t exist in the universe.
A quasar is the compacted center of a galaxy surrounding a massive black hole from the early days of the universe. Quasars go through periods of extreme brightness which can last anywhere from 10 to 100 million years. They tend to band together in enormous clusters, or structures, forming large quasar groups (LQGs).
The international group of scientists led by Roger Clowes from the University of Central Lancashire’s Jeremiah Horrocks Institute, used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a major surveying project that uses 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope located at New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory, to make their findings.
Clowes and his colleagues are astounded by the size of this structure, which defies the Cosmological Principal, based on Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity that assumes when you look at the universe from a sufficiently large scale; it looks the same no matter where you are observing it from. The Cosmological Principle, according to the research team, is assumed but has never been demonstrated observationally ‘beyond reasonable doubt.’
“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe,” said Clowes. “This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the universe. The universe doesn’t seem to be as uniform as we thought.”
Clusters of galaxies can be anywhere from six to 10 million light-years across, but the LQGs can be 650 million light-years or more across. Making calculations based on the Cosmological Principle, along with the modern theory of cosmology, astrophysicists shouldn’t be able to find a structure in the universe larger than 1.2 billion light-years, much less four billion light-years across as this newly sighted structure is.
To get some additional perspective of what the astronomers found, let’s step back and give it a sense of scale. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is separated from its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, by a distance of 2.5 million light-years.
Clowes points out that his team’s discovery does have a typical dimension of 1.6 billion light-years. But, because it is elongated, its longest dimension is four billion light-years, making it about 1,650 times larger than the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda.
Milky Way Contains Billions of Earth-sized Planets, Studies Find
There are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds in our Milky Way galaxy, according to two new studies.
Both groups of scientists used data from NASA’s Kepler mission to reach their conclusions, which were presented to the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California.
The scientists found that the closer the planets are to their stars, the easier they are to find because they transit more frequently, giving scientists more opportunities to observe them.
One group, led by Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said its studies show 50 percent of stars in our galaxy have a planet the size of Earth or larger closely orbiting them.
Add in larger planets, which have been found to be in wider orbits around its star, and the percentage of stars with planets goes up to 70 percent, according to the researchers.
Based on current ongoing observations from the Kepler mission, along with others using different detection techniques, it looks like practically all Sun-like stars have planets, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian team.
A second group of researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, found smaller exoplanets to be much more plentiful than larger ones in the star systems it observed. The analysis also confirmed that the frequency of planets increased as its size decreased, which team member Andrew Howard and the Kepler team reported last year.
Perhaps one percent of stars have planets the size of Jupiter, while 10 percent have planets the size of Neptune, according to the Berkeley/ Hawaii team. The group’s research also shows the exoplanets they observed, which were two or three times the diameter of Earth, are typically more like our solar system’s Uranus and Neptune, each of which has a rocky core surrounded by helium and hydrogen gases and, perhaps, water.
They suggest planets orbiting close to their stars may even be water worlds, with oceans hundreds of kilometers deep, surrounding a rocky core.
Although the planets between one to two times larger than Earth may not necessarily be habitable, the Berkeley/Hawaii team said those planets might be rocky and, if they’re located within what they call the “Goldilocks zone” –not too hot, not too cold, just right for liquid water– could support life.
The Harvard-Smithsonian researchers found that, except for the gas giants, the type of star didn’t really have much effect on the size of its planets, contradicting previous findings. Neptune-type planets, they said, can be found just as frequently orbiting around relatively cool stars, called red dwarfs, as they are around sun-like stars. The same is true for smaller worlds.
“Earths and super-Earths aren’t picky,” said Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian team. “We’re finding them in all kinds of neighborhoods.”
As more data is gathered, more planets in larger orbits will be revealed, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian researchers. They say when Kepler’s mission is extended, astronomers should be able to spot Earth-sized planets at greater distances, including those with Earth-like orbits within the habitable zone.