What are the densest objects in the universe. Astronomers have discovered the largest object in the universe. Where is the greatest mass concentrated

Translated from Spanish, El Gordo means "fat man". This is how astronomers called the largest and hottest known cluster of galaxies in our universe. The El Gordo cluster is located 9.7 billion light years from Earth. It consists of two separate smaller clusters colliding at several million kilometers per hour.

Pulsar J1311-3430, or Black Widow, weighs as much as two Suns, but is no wider than Washington State. Every day, this superdense neutron star grows larger, "eating" a nearby companion star. For 93 minutes, the pulsar makes a full revolution around its victim, raining streams of radiation on it and taking away its energy. This process has one outcome: one day the victim will completely disappear.

A year on the asteroid (3753) Cruithney lasts about the same as on Earth - 364 days. This means that this celestial body rotates at almost the same distance from the Sun as our planet. Our orbiting twin was discovered in 1986. However, there is no threat of collision: Cruithney will not come closer than 12 million kilometers to Earth.

Rejected by its parent star, the lonely planet CFBDSIR2149 wanders the universe 100 light years away. Most likely, this wanderer was thrown out of her solar system in the turbulent years of its formation, when the orbits of other planets were determined.

The Smith Cloud is a giant cluster of hydrogen gas millions of times heavier than the Sun. Its length is 11 thousand light years, and its width is 2.5 thousand years. In shape, the cloud resembles a torpedo, and in fact - too: the cloud rushes towards our galaxy and crashes into the Milky Way in about 27 million years.

In 300 thousand light years from the center of the Milky Way lies a satellite galaxy, which is almost entirely composed of dark matter and gas. Scientists discovered evidence of its existence in 2009. And only a few months ago, astronomers managed to find four stars 100 million years old in this cluster of dark matter.

The blue hue of the Marble Planet HD 189733b is associated with the oceans. In fact, it is a gas giant orbiting close to the star. There has never been water. The temperature is over 927 degrees Celsius. And the "heavenly blue" is created by the rain of molten glass.

When our universe was only about 875 million years old, a black hole with a mass of 12 billion Suns formed in space. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (above) is only 4 million times heavier than the Sun. Supermassive J0100 + 2802 is located in the center of a galaxy located 12.8 billion light years away. Now scientists are racking their brains over the question: how did she manage to achieve such dimensions in such a short period of time?

The star R136a1 is 256 times heavier than the Sun and 7.4 million times brighter than it. Scientists believe that colossi of this size could appear as a result of the merger of many smaller stars. The life span of a fiery chimera is only a few million years, after which its components burn out.

The Boomerang Nebula, 5,000 light-years from Earth, is the coldest place in the universe. The temperature inside the cloud of gas and dust reaches -272 degrees below zero. The cloud is expanding at a speed of about 590 thousand km per hour. The gas of the nebula is cooled by its sudden expansion, just like the refrigerant in refrigerators.

Our rating includes the largest, coldest, hottest, oldest, deadliest, lonely, darkest, brightest - and other "very-very" objects that a person managed to find in space. Some are literally on the doorstep, while others are on the edge of the universe we know.

Astronomers have the concept of "the largest object in the universe." This status is periodically assigned to one or another object, but their very presence is already a sensation. What kind of "giants" are we talking about and where are they located? And which one is really "the best"? Here are the results of some of the latest astronomical discoveries.

Scientists have figured out the age of the universe

Supervoid

This largest coldest spot in the universe is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. The spot is 1.8 billion light years across. Although "void" means "void" in English, this name for this area of ​​space is not entirely correct. It's just that there are about 30 percent fewer galaxy clusters here than in the surrounding space.

Cold spots are filled with cosmic microwave background radiation. But so far it is not entirely clear to scientists how they arise. One of the versions says that these are traces of black holes. parallel universes... But another hypothesis claims that this is the result of protons passing through voids: passing through empty space, particles lose their energy ... True, it is possible that there is no connection at all between cold spots and voids.

Superblob

In 2006, the title of the largest object in the Universe was awarded to a cosmic "bubble" (blob) stretching 200 million light years, which is a giant accumulation of gas, dust and galaxies. Curiously, the galaxies in this jellyfish-shaped cluster are four times denser than usual in the Universe.

Clusters of galaxies and gas balls inside a giant bubble are called the Lyman-Alpha bubbles. According to scientists, they formed about 2 billion years after Big bang.

As for the superblob itself, it probably formed when massive stars that existed since the dawn of space went supernovae, releasing a huge amount of gas in the process.

Perhaps the superblob is one of the most ancient space objects. So much gas accumulates in it that over time more and more galaxies will form from it.

Great Wall CfA2

It was discovered by the American astrophysicist Margaret Joan Geller and John Peter Huchra while studying the redshift effect for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. CfA2 is 500 million light years long and 16 million light years wide. The name "Great Wall" is given to this space region, as in its shape it resembles the Great Wall of China.

It is possible that the extent of CfA2 may be even greater - 750 million light years. But the exact parameters cannot yet be named, since the "wall" is partially located in the "zone of avoidance" - it is closed by dense accumulations of gas and dust, which contributes to the distortion of optical wavelengths.

Sloan's Great Wall

It was discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, which involves scientifically mapping galaxies to determine the presence of the largest objects in the universe. This object is made up of several superclusters, with a total length of 1.4 billion light years.

Although, according to the cosmological principle, objects larger than 1.2 billion light years cannot exist in the universe, the presence of Sloan's Great Wall completely refutes this theory.

By the way, some of the clusters that make up the Sloan Great Wall have very interesting characteristics... So, one of them has a nucleus of galaxies, from the side looking like a giant antennae. Inside the other, there is a process of close interaction and merging of galaxies.

Giant Gamma Ring

The giant galactic gamma ring (Giant GRB Ring) is today considered the second largest object in the universe. It spans 5 billion light years.

The object was found like this. Studying the bursts of gamma radiation resulting from the death of massive stars, astronomers drew attention to a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were located at the same distance from the Earth. They formed a ring in the sky that was 70 times the diameter of the full moon.

It was hypothesized that the gamma ring may be a projection of a certain sphere, around which all bursts of gamma radiation occurred in a relatively short period of time - about 250 million years.

But what could have created such a sphere? One theory is that galaxies cluster around regions with a high concentration of dark matter. But in fact, the exact reason for the formation of such structures remains unknown.

Thanks to rapid development technology, astronomers are making more and more interesting and incredible discoveries in the universe. For example, the title of "the largest object in the Universe" passes from one finds to another almost every year. Some discovered objects are so huge that they baffle even the best scientists on our planet with their fact. Let's talk about the ten largest ones.

More recently, scientists have discovered the largest cold spot in the universe. It is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. Spreading 1.8 billion light years, this spot has puzzled scientists. They had no idea that objects of this size could exist.

Despite the presence of the word "void" in the title (from English "void" means "emptiness"), the space here is not entirely empty. This region of space has about 30 percent fewer galaxy clusters than the surrounding space. According to scientists, voids make up up to 50 percent of the volume of the Universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to super-strong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them.

Superblob

In 2006, the title of the largest object in the Universe was given to the discovered mysterious space "bubble" (or blob, as scientists usually call them). True, he did not retain this title for long. This 200 million light-year bubble is a giant cluster of gas, dust and galaxies. With some reservations, this object looks like a giant green jellyfish. The object was discovered by Japanese astronomers when they studied one of the regions of space, known for the presence of a huge volume of cosmic gas.

Each of the three "tentacles" of this bubble contains galaxies, which are located four times more densely than usual in the Universe. The cluster of galaxies and gas balls inside this bubble are called Lyman-Alpha bubbles. It is believed that these objects began to appear about 2 billion years after the Big Bang and are real relics of the ancient universe. Scientists speculate that the discussed bubble formed when massive stars that existed in the early days of space suddenly went supernovae and ejected huge volumes of gas into space. The object is so massive that scientists believe that it is, by and large, one of the first formed space objects in the universe. According to theories, over time, more and more new galaxies will form from the gas accumulated here.

Shapley Supercluster

For many years, scientists believe that our galaxy at a speed of 2.2 million kilometers per hour is attracted through the Universe somewhere in the direction of the direction of the constellation Centaurus. Astronomers speculate that this is due to the Great Attractor, an object with enough gravity to pull entire galaxies toward it. True, scientists could not find out what kind of object it was for a long time. This object is believed to be located behind the so-called "zone of avoidance" (ZOA), an area in the sky that is obscured by the Milky Way galaxy.

However, over time, X-ray astronomy came to the rescue. Its development allowed us to look beyond the ZOA and find out what exactly is the reason for such a strong gravitational attraction. True, what the scientists saw put them into an even greater impasse. It turned out that behind the ZOA region there is an ordinary cluster of galaxies. The size of this cluster did not correlate with the force of gravitational attraction exerted on our galaxy. But as soon as scientists decided to look deeper into space, they soon discovered that our galaxy was being pulled towards an even larger object. It turned out to be the Shapley supercluster - the most massive supercluster of galaxies in the observable universe.

The supercluster consists of more than 8000 galaxies. Its mass is about 10,000 more than the mass of the Milky Way.

Great Wall CfA2

Like most of the objects on this list, the Great Wall (also known as the Great Wall of CfA2) once boasted the title of the largest known space object in the universe. It was discovered by American astrophysicist Margaret Joan Geller and John Peter Hunra while studying the redshift effect for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Scientists estimate that it is 500 million light years long, 300 million wide, and 15 million light years thick.

The exact size of the Great Wall is still a mystery to scientists. It could be much larger than it is believed and be 750 million light-years across. The problem with sizing is the location of this giant structure. As with the Shapley Supercluster, the Great Wall is partially obscured by a "zone of avoidance."

In general, this "zone of avoidance" does not allow discerning about 20 percent of the observable (accessible to today's telescopes) Universe. It lies within the Milky Way and is a dense accumulation of gas and dust (as well as a high concentration of stars) that greatly distort observations. In order to see through the "zone of avoidance", astronomers have to use, for example, infrared telescopes, which allow them to break through another 10 percent of the "zone of avoidance". Through what infrared waves cannot break through, radio waves, as well as near-infrared waves and X-rays, break through. Nevertheless, the actual lack of the opportunity to consider such a large region of space is somewhat frustrating for scientists. A "zone of avoidance" may contain information that can fill the gaps in our knowledge of space.

Supercluster Laniakea

Galaxies are usually grouped together. These groups are called clusters. Regions of space where these clusters are more densely located among themselves are called superclusters. Astronomers have previously mapped these objects by determining their physical location in the universe, but recently a new way of mapping local space has been invented. This shed light on information that was previously unavailable.

The new principle of mapping the local space and the galaxies in it is based not on calculating the location of objects, but on observing the indicators of the gravitational effect of objects. Thanks to the new method, the location of galaxies is determined and, on the basis of this, a map of the distribution of gravity in the Universe is compiled. Compared to the old ones, the new method is more advanced because it allows astronomers not only to mark new objects in the universe we see, but also to find new objects in places where it was not possible to look before.

The first results of a study of a local cluster of galaxies using the new method allowed the discovery of a new supercluster. The importance of this study is that it will allow us to better understand where we belong in the universe. The Milky Way was previously thought to be inside the Virgo supercluster, but a new study reveals that the region is just part of the even larger Laniakea supercluster, one of the largest objects in the universe. It spans 520 million light years, and we are somewhere within it.

Sloan's Great Wall

The Sloan Great Wall was first discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a scientific mapping of hundreds of millions of galaxies to identify the largest objects in the universe. The Sloan Great Wall is a giant galactic filament made up of several superclusters. They are like the tentacles of a giant octopus are distributed in all directions of the universe. At 1.4 billion light years long, the "wall" was once thought to be the largest object in the universe.

The Sloan Great Wall itself is not as well understood as the superclusters that reside within it. Some of these superclusters are interesting in their own right and deserve special mention. One, for example, has a nucleus of galaxies that together look like giant tendrils from the side. Inside another supercluster, there is a high gravitational interaction between galaxies - many of them are now undergoing a merger period.

The presence of a "wall" and any other larger objects creates new questions about the mysteries of the universe. Their existence is contrary to the cosmological principle, which theoretically limits how large objects in the universe can be. According to this principle, the laws of the universe do not allow objects over 1.2 billion light years in size to exist. However, objects like Sloan's Great Wall completely contradict this opinion.

Quasar group Huge-LQG7

Quasars are high-energy astronomical objects located in the center of galaxies. It is believed that the center of quasars are supermassive black holes that attract surrounding matter. This results in a huge emission of radiation, the power of which is 1000 times greater than the energy generated by all the stars within the galaxy. Currently in third place among the largest structural objects in the Universe is the Huge-LQG group of quasars, consisting of 73 quasars scattered over 4 billion light years. Scientists believe that such a massive group of quasars, as well as similar ones, are one of the reasons for the appearance of the largest structural in the Universe, such as, for example, the Sloan Great Wall.

The Huge-LQG group of quasars was discovered after analyzing the same data that discovered the Sloan Great Wall. Scientists have determined its presence after mapping one of the regions of space using a special algorithm that measures the density of the location of quasars in a certain area.

It should be noted that the very existence of the Huge-LQG is still a matter of controversy. Some scientists believe that this region of space really represents a single group of quasars, while other scientists are confident that quasars inside this region of space are randomly located and are not part of one group.

Giant Gamma Ring

Spreading over 5 billion light years, the Giant GRB Ring is the second largest object in the universe. In addition to its incredible size, this object attracts attention due to its unusual shape. Astronomers, studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that form as a result of the death of massive stars), found a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were located at the same distance to the Earth. These bursts formed a ring in the sky 70 times the diameter of the full moon. Considering that gamma ray bursts themselves are quite rare, the chance that they will form a similar shape in the sky is 1 in 20,000. This allowed scientists to assume that they are witnesses of one of the largest structural objects in the Universe. ...

By itself, "ring" is just a term describing the visual representation of this phenomenon when viewed from Earth. According to one of the assumptions, the giant gamma ring may be a projection of a certain sphere, around which all gamma emissions occurred in a relatively short period of time, about 250 million years. True, here the question arises as to what kind of source could create such a sphere. One explanation has to do with the assumption that galaxies can gather in groups around a huge concentration of dark matter. However, this is only a theory. Scientists still don't know how these structures are formed.

Great Wall of Hercules - Northern Crown

The largest structural object in the Universe has also been discovered by astronomers as part of observing gamma rays. Dubbed the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown, this object spans 10 billion light-years, making it twice the size of the Giant Galactic Gamma Ring. Since the brightest bursts of gamma rays are produced by larger stars, usually located in areas of space that contain more matter, astronomers each time metaphorically treat each burst as a needle prick into something larger. When scientists discovered that gamma-ray bursts were occurring too often in the area of ​​space in the direction of the constellations Hercules and the Northern Corona, they determined that there was an astronomical object, which was most likely a dense concentration of galactic clusters and other matter.

Interesting fact: the name "Great Wall Hercules - Northern Crown" was invented by a Filipino teenager who wrote it down on Wikipedia (anyone who does not know can edit this electronic encyclopedia). Shortly after the news that astronomers had discovered a huge structure in the cosmic sky, a corresponding article appeared on the pages of Wikipedia. Despite the fact that the invented name does not quite accurately describe this object (the wall covers several constellations at once, not just two), the world Internet quickly got used to it. This may be the first time that Wikipedia has given a name to a discovered and scientifically interesting object.

Since the very existence of this "wall" also contradicts the cosmological principle, scientists have to revise some of their theories about how the universe actually formed.

Cosmic web

Scientists believe that the expansion of the universe is not random. There are theories according to which all galaxies in space are organized into one structure of incredible size, reminiscent of thread-like connections that unite dense regions. These threads are scattered between the less dense voids. Scientists call this structure the Cosmic Web.

According to scientists, the web was formed at a very early stage in the history of the universe. At first, the formation of the web was unstable and heterogeneous, which subsequently helped the formation of everything that is now in the Universe. It is believed that the "threads" of this web played a big role in the evolution of the Universe - they accelerated it. It is noted that galaxies that are inside these filaments have a significantly higher star formation rate. In addition, these filaments are a kind of bridge for the gravitational interaction between galaxies. Once formed within these filaments, galaxies travel to galaxy clusters, where they eventually die.

Only recently have scientists begun to understand what this Cosmic Web really is. Studying one of the distant quasars, the researchers noted that their radiation affects one of the strands of the Cosmic Web. The light of the quasar went straight to one of the filaments, which heated the gases in it and made them glow. Based on these observations, scientists were able to imagine the distribution of filaments between other galaxies, thereby compiling a picture of the "skeleton of the cosmos."

The universe is something that our mind cannot comprehend. Some scientists call the Universe the entire material world that surrounds us. The human mind is simply unable to understand and analyze its true dimensions.

No one knows whether the universe is finite or not, but it has been scientifically proven that it is constantly expanding. This place brings together amazing objects such as nebulae, galaxies, quasars, star clusters, black holes, quasars. Let's talk about the largest objects in the Universe.

The largest asteroid in the universe

The largest asteroid is called Vesta, and it is recognized as the brightest visible asteroid that can be seen in the starry sky even without a telescope or spyglass. The dimensions of the asteroid are 578x560x478 kilometers... It has a slightly elongated asymmetric shape and can even be attributed to dwarf planets such as Mercury. The asteroid is located in the belt between Jupiter and Mars. The celestial body was discovered in 2010 using the Dawn apparatus. It is worth saying that the threat of an asteroid due to the high gravity acting on it from Jupiter for the Earth does not represent.

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The largest planets in the universe

The largest black hole

The largest supermassive black hole in the visible universe was discovered in the constellation Perseus, 228 light-years from Earth. This black hole is located in a galaxy: NGC 1277. This black hole contains just a gigantic amount of matter, which is approximately twelve billion times the mass of our Sun.

It turned out that this black hole weighs about 15 percent of the mass of the entire galaxy, although usually black holes weigh no more than one and a half percent. By the way, such a small black hole is located in the center of our Milky Way. Scientists agreed that a galaxy with a supermassive hole is very strange, since the nature of the formation of such an object is incomprehensible to physicists.

The largest galaxy

The largest galaxy in the universe is called IC 1101. It is a large supergiant located in the center of the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster. The galaxy is located one billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is a CD-class galaxy with a diameter of 7 million light years. The object is considered the largest among the known galaxies that have been discovered during the entire time of cosmological research.

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Stars and constellations

The galaxy IC 1101 contains over one hundred trillion stars. If this galaxy were in the place of the Milky Way, then it would have swallowed not only it, but also the Andromeda Nebula, the Triangle galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds.

Shapley Supercluster

The Shapley Supercluster is a huge cluster of stars that was discovered in 1989. It has a high density of stars. In total, according to preliminary calculations, the Shapley supercluster contains a concentration of stars for more than 500 million light years. It also contains large galaxies A3560, A3558 and A3559. In total, there are about twenty-five galaxies in the Shapley supercluster.

Largest pulsar

The largest pulsar, which is a bright pulsating star with superdense mass, was discovered in the Tarantula Nebula. It was discovered with a powerful gamma-ray telescope 165 thousand light-years from the Milky Way galaxy. A pulsar was formed after the explosion of the star, and its core became a powerful neutron star. With a diameter of a couple of kilometers, the mass of the pulsar is twenty times the mass of the Sun. Its gamma radiation is five times higher than that of the famous pulsar from the Crab Nebula. The pulsar rotates at a speed of twenty revolutions per second, emitting the most powerful gamma radiation.

The ancient pyramids, the tallest skyscraper in Dubai, almost half a kilometer high, the grandiose Everest - at one glance at these huge objects will take your breath away. And at the same time, in comparison with some objects in the universe, they differ in microscopic size.

In terms of area, black holes are not that big. However, when you consider their mass, these objects are the largest in the universe. And the largest black hole in space is a quasar, the mass of which is 17 billion times (!) Greater than the mass of the Sun. This is a huge black hole at the very center of the galaxy NGC 1277, an object larger than the entire solar system- its mass is 14% of the total mass of the whole galaxy.

The so-called "super galaxies" are several galaxies fused together and located in galactic "clusters", clusters of galaxies. The largest of these "super galaxies" is IC1101, which is 60 times larger than the galaxy where our solar system is located. IC1101 is 6 million light years across. By comparison, the Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years across.

The Shapley Supercluster is a collection of galaxies over 400 million light years across. The Milky Way is about 4,000 times smaller than this super galaxy. The Shapley Supercluster is so much larger that the fastest spaceships It would take the Earth trillions of years to cross it.

A huge group of quasars was discovered in January 2013 and is today considered the largest structure in the entire universe. The Huge-LQG is a collection of 73 quasars so large that it would take over 4 billion years to cross from end to end at the speed of light. The mass of this massive space object is approximately 3 million times the mass of the Milky Way. The Huge-LQG group of quasars is so grand that its existence disproves Einstein's basic cosmological principle. According to this cosmological position, the universe always looks the same, no matter where the observer is.

Not so long ago, astronomers managed to discover something completely amazing - a cosmic network formed by clusters of galaxies surrounded by dark matter, and resembling a giant three-dimensional spider web. How big is this interstellar network? If the Milky Way galaxy were an ordinary seed, then this cosmic network would be like a huge stadium in size.