- 3701 - UNIVERSE - is a big place? The universe is a big place, and it's full of big planets, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies extend upward on ever-more-massive scales. Here are some examples:
--------------------- 3701 - UNIVERSE - is a big place?
- Mysterious “GQ Lupi b” was first discovered in 2005. Orbiting a young star around two and a half times farther than Pluto is from the sun, the companion object seemed to be either a planet or a brown dwarf. The best estimates suggest this planet has a radius around 3.5 times that of Jupiter, meaning that if it is an exoplanet, it's the largest ever found.
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- The largest star is “UY Scuti”. Our Sun appears as a tiny dot in comparison. UY Scuti is a hypergiant star with a radius 1,700 times larger than the sun, making it the biggest known star in the universe. If someone were to place UY Scuti at the center of the solar system, its edge would extend just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Gas and dust streaming from the star would extend even farther out, beyond the orbit of Pluto, 400 times the Earth-sun distance.
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- The “Tarantula Nebula” is both the largest known nebula and most active star-forming region in our local galactic neighborhood. It stretches for more than 1,800 light-years at its longest span. Also known as “30 Doradus“, it is located 170,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy that orbits our Milky Way. In this stellar nursery are beautiful folds of gas and dust where young stars are being born.
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- In 2004, astronomers noticed a gigantic region of empty space in maps created by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, which scanned in exquisite detail the cosmic microwave background, or the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. The spot, which spans 1.8 billion light-years across is strangely devoid of stars, gas, dust and even dark matter. Researchers remain baffled as to how exactly one of this size and scale formed.
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- Our Milky Way galaxy is around 100,000 light-years across, but that's fairly average for a spiral galaxy. In comparison, the largest known galaxy, “IC 1101“, is 50 times larger and about 2,000 times more massive than our galactic home. Stretching for an impressive 5.5 million light-years, it is so big that, if placed where the Milky Way is now, its edge would reach past our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda.
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- Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk in the center of every galaxy and can clock in at many millions of times the mass of the sun. But the biggest known black hole can be found powering a distant quasar. Quasars are gigantic objects in the early universe spewing out insane amounts of radiation. This one, “TON 618,” has an estimated mass of 66 billion suns.
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- In 2010, astronomers using the Fermi space telescope discovered colossal structures emerging from the Milky Way. These massive blobs, which can only be seen in certain wavelengths of light, are a towering 25,000 light-years tall which is a quarter of the Milky Way's width. The bubbles are the result of an ancient feeding frenzy that our galaxy's central black hole experienced, resulting in enormous belches of energy.
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- Back when the universe was only a tenth of its current age, 14 galaxies began crashing together and forming the most massive known gravitationally bound cosmic object, protocluster “SPT2349-56“. Squeezed together in a space that's only about three times as big as our Milky Way galaxy, this mega-merger will eventually combine into a single galaxy weighing 10 trillion times the mass of the sun. Around 50 additional galaxies surround the structure, which will settle into a gigantic object known as a “galactic cluster“, in which many galaxies orbit one another.
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- Astronomer Harlow Shapley discovered a colossal collection of galaxies in the 1930s that now bears his name. Containing more than 8,000 galaxies and with a mass of more than 10 million billion times that of the sun, the “Shapley Supercluster” is the largest structure in the local universe.
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- Our Milky Way is just a tiny member of a collection of collections of galaxies known as the “Laniakea Supercluster“. Though it has no formal boundaries, astronomers estimate that it contains around 100,000 galaxies with a total mass about 100 million billion times that of the sun, and stretches for more than 520 million light-years across.
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- The distant black-hole-powered superbright objects known as “quasars” are mighty large. Quasars can come together into clusters, with the largest one imaginatively named the “Huge-LQG” . Containing 73 quasars and an estimated mass of 6.1 quintillion (that's a 1 followed by 18 zeros) suns, the colossal cosmic collection is thought to be 4 billion light-years across at its biggest span.
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- By mapping the locations of gamma-ray bursts which are fleeting but powerful explosions that occur when a massive star dies astronomers uncovered what is often considered to be the largest known entity in the universe “the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall“.
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- This object is 10 billion light-years across and could contain billions of galaxies. The Great Wall was first discovered in 2013 when surveys showed gamma-rays particularly concentrated about 10 billion light-years away in the direction of the Hercules and Corona Borealis constellations.
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October 8, 2022 UNIVERSE - is a big place? 3701
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--------------------- --- Tuesday, October 11, 2022 ---------------------------
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