Largest Object in the Universe Discovered 274
prostoalex writes "Quick, think of the largest object you can imagine. Whatever your imagination delivered it probably wasn't an 'enormous amoeba-like structure 200 light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas,' a newly found object, as USA Today reports."
That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:5, Informative)
200 != 200,000,000 (Score:2, Informative)
Something 200 light years across is not big (on galactic scales). TFA says the structure here is 200 million LY.
Submission is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Also, the article is somewhat misleading itself, as the blob isn't really a homogenous structure. It's just a group of galaxies packed together more closely than other clusters. So it isn't really that much different from other parts of the Universe.
Re:Large Packets of Gas? (Score:4, Informative)
SO if its 2000 times as big as our galaxy and we are just NOW being able to see it. Its probably REALLY REALLY far away.. I would guess!
Another note our cluster of galaxies called the Virgo cluster which containes most of the visible galaxies such as Andromeda is 100 million light years across.
Press release (Score:5, Informative)
Re:200 MILLION light-years wide... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Wall? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Submission is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
"A team of astronomers using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea has discovered giant, three-dimensional filaments of galaxies extending across 200 million light-years of space. These filaments, which formed a mere 2 billion years after the birth of the universe, are the largest-known structures ever discovered. They are studded with more than 30 large concentrations of gas, each up to ten times as massive as our own galaxy. These giant gas clouds are probably the progenitors of the most massive galaxies that exist in the universe today.
[
The Subaru observations were successful in finding much fainter objects than previously discovered in this region. (Figure 4) For example, they found 33 new large concentrations of gas along the filamentary structure extending across 100,000 light-years. This is the first time that so many large concentrations of gas, known to astronomers as Lyman alpha blobs, have been discovered in the distant universe.
Astronomers think that such Lyman alpha blobs, named so since they are seen in the Lyman alpha emission line of hydrogen, are probably related to the births of the largest galaxies. In the "gravitational heating" model, the blobs are regions where gas is collapsing under its own gravity to form a galaxy. The "photoionization" model attributes emission from the gas to ionization by ultraviolet light from newborn stars or a massive black hole. The "shock heating" or "galactic superwind" model hypothesizes that the glow of the gas is caused by the death of many massive stars born early in the history of the universe, living out short lives, and then dying in supernova explosions that blow out surrounding gas. Team members Yoshiaki Taniguchi and Yasuhiro Shioya (Ehime University) have been advocating for the galactic superwind model.
Observations with the DEIMOS spectrograph at the Keck II telescope revealed that the gas inside the blobs move with speeds greater that 500 kilometers per second (300 miles per second). The extent of the gas concentrations and the speed of the material within them suggest that these regions must be up to ten times as massive as the Milky Way Galaxy."
PS: The "galactic superwind" theory gets my vote for the coolest theory name!
Re:Large Packets of Gas? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure-- that's just what most astronomers expect happened. Remember that when we look really far away, we're also looking really far back in time, back far enough that we're starting to be able to see somethings about the universe before many of the galaxies which exist today existed.
The big questions are about things like how uniform was the distribution of the initial gas, when star formation first started happening what kind of stars appeared, and whether the first stars did interesting things like blow up in nova/supernova-type events, or become giant black holes like many galaxies seem to have, and what that would mean for the clouds of gas and the galaxies being formed from it, etc.
Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed. On a cosmic level we have no way of knowing if the known universe is just a small part of a larger structure. As such, all of the known universe could be "single object", so lets be serious about the way we define things, especially in physics.
In my opinion, TFA is a load of crud. An "object" is a single item. To use an astrophysics definition, it is a parcel of matter of contiguous structure bound by atomic or molecular forces (but not magnetic or gravitic) incorporating solid or liquid state matter, but not gasses or plasmas.
Following this definition:
Stop with the hyperbole already. A collection of galaxies and gasses and the missing brains of Slashdot readers is not a single object. Calling it one is just an excuse to attract attention to a "hey my discovered object is bigger than yours" competition.