"Where Tuesdays are always super!"
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Physical
reality can stagger even the most fertile of imaginations. The
structures within the Universe are so grand and the space separating
them so vast that the sheer extent of the Universe is utterly
unfathomable. Our weighty Earth, a behemoth from our perspective, is
literally sub atomic in relation to the cosmos that spawned it.
Miraculously, beings inhabiting this minuscule point have mapped the
visible Universe almost to its definable boundaries. In so doing, they
have discovered not only stars gathered in galaxies, but galaxies bound
in clusters and clusters, themselves, comprising super clusters.
These super clusters serve as components to even larger constructs:
great "walls" in which the light outflow of entire galaxies appears as
little more than morning Sun shone on cobweb filaments.
Astronomers
have recently announced the discovery of the greatest structure yet
found. Called BOSS, after the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survery,
this great wall extends for more than one billion light years. It
consists of galactic super clusters tenuously bound by gravity. As
BOSS is more than 4.5 billion light years away, astronomers can observe
its entire extent.
Click on the link to see today's article and a beautiful image of BOSS. ]
This
superstructure consists of 830 separate galaxies and is about 10,000
times more massive that our Milky Way Galaxy. Realize that, if we
made a scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy that reduced it to the size
of the North American continent, our solar system would fit inside a
coffee cup and one would need a microscope to find Earth. This might
give on an idea about BOSS's immense size as it dwarfs the Milky Way.