“The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall: The Largest Object in the Universe”

KOMPAS.com – The universe is a very big place, which is also filled with great things. There are planets, stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies extending upwards on an increasingly massive scale.

According to Live Science, the largest object in the universe that scientists have identified is a galactic supercluster called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.

This object is so vast that it takes light about 10 billion years to travel through its entire structure. For comparison, the universe itself is only 13.8 billion years old.

What is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall?

Currently, the best candidate for the largest known supercluster in the universe is the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, even though astronomers have spent nearly a decade debating its structure.

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In 2013, a research team led by Istvan Horvath of the National University of Public Service, Hungary, announced the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall at the 7th Huntsville Gamma-Ray Burst Symposium.

Scientists have been studying brief cosmic phenomena known as gamma-ray bursts, which astronomers believe originate from supernovae or massive exploding stars at the end of their lifetimes. Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be a good indication of where large masses of things are in the universe, because massive stars tend to cluster in denser environments.

Horvath and his colleagues found gamma rays were especially concentrated about 10 billion light years away toward the constellations Hercules and Corona Borealis.

However, how this massive structure came to be is a puzzle. According to Horvath, this structure seems to contradict the principles of cosmology or how the universe formed and evolved.

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The principle in question is that matter should be uniform when viewed at a large enough scale, but the clusters are not uniform.

“I would have thought this structure was too big to exist. Even as a researcher, I still have my doubts,” said Jon Hakkila, research astronomy at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.