\n By mapping the brightest explosions in the universe, scientists may have uncovered a megastructure that defies our understanding of how the cosmos is built.\n <\/p>\n
If you thought the cosmic web was tangled enough, think again. A team of astrophysicists recently used gamma-ray bursts\u2014those spectacular, enigmatic explosions of energy from the farthest reaches of the cosmos\u2014to reveal that the largest-known structure in the universe may be even larger than previously thought.<\/p>\n
The structure is the Hercules\u2013Corona Borealis Great Wall, a filament of galaxy groups and clusters that spans about 10 billion light-years across. The structure\u2019s new size estimate is causing fresh headaches for standard cosmological models, as it appears even larger than the previous high estimate of about 9.8 billion light-years.<\/p>\n
In a new study\u2014not yet peer-reviewed and hosted<\/a> on the preprint server arXiv\u2014a joint Hungarian-American research team led by Istv\u00e1n Horv\u00e1th of Budapest\u2019s University of Public Service scanned the sky for patterns. The team used a dataset of 542 gamma-ray bursts with known redshifts, essentially meaning their distances are known. The bursts are basically nature\u2019s flashbangs\u2014extremely luminous<\/a> bursts of high-energy light capable of\u00a0outshining entire galaxies<\/a> for brief moments. These brilliant bursts are observable from great distances, making them ideal cosmic signposts. And when astronomers begin to notice them clustering into a single area of the sky, major questions begin to emerge.<\/p>\n The researchers tested a distribution of points across the universe to find that the great wall\u2014originally discovered in 2014\u2014might span a redshift range from z = 0.33 to z = 2.43. In other words: The structure stretches across a mind-bending amount of space and time. We\u2019re talking billions of light-years. And no, this isn\u2019t a pixel glitch or some weird telescope fluke\u2014the authors ruled out statistical artifacts and sampling biases.<\/p>\n But according to the cosmological principle<\/a>, the universe should be roughly homogeneous on large scales. The commonly accepted upper limit for such structures is about 370 megaparsecs (roughly 1.2 billion light-years), the paper stated. But Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall\u2014so named for the constellations in the same region\u2014is far beyond that. It makes the Sloan Great Wall<\/a> and even the Giant Quasar Group<\/a> look like dollhouses.<\/p>\n The Hercules-Corona Borealis superstructure isn\u2019t just a patch of sky cluttered with gamma-ray bursts\u2014it\u2019s likely a dense region of galaxies, stars, and dark matter, held together by gravity. Furthermore, the brilliant gamma bursts could reveal structures invisible to other surveys; since these bursts are associated with massive stellar deaths, they might trace star formation in a way that galaxy surveys don\u2019t.<\/p>\n If the team behind the new study is correct\u2014that structures of this immense size can form in the universe\u2014then the cosmological principle may be in need of a tune-up. Of course, it\u2019s also possible that we\u2019re missing something fundamental in our understanding of how the universe evolved. Frankly, it\u2019s probably a bit of both.<\/p>\n So the next time you glance up at the stars and marvel at how small you feel\u2014just remember, you\u2019re even smaller than that\u2014at least compared to a \u201cwall\u201d that nearly makes the scale of the cosmos itself mundane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By mapping the brightest explosions in the universe, scientists may have uncovered a megastructure that defies our understanding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[22268,74,22269,70,5636,5638,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-39121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-gamma-rays","9":"tag-physics","10":"tag-quasar","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-stars","13":"tag-the-universe","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114377644158837351","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}