What Is The Biggest Thing In The Universe?

what is the biggest thing in the

universe in 1985 cosmologists believed

that they had found the answer a team

led by John hucker at the Harvard

Smithsonian Center for astrophysics had

just completed a survey of thousands of

galaxies in the direction of the

constellation Koma barones but as they

looked through the results they noticed

something odd stretched across hundreds

of millions of light years a shape began

to slowly appear the shape of a

person a

stickman but the creature with a long

slender torso outstretched arms and

dancing legs was no monster of ancient

legend it was one of our first glimpses

of a super cluster and it was not

alone our observable universe turned out

to be full of superclusters roughly 10

million in total each one containing

tens of thousands even hundreds of

thousands of galaxies indeed our own

Milky Way is nestled inside of one known

as lanaka on one of its outer Limbs and

these superclusters are massive at their

smallest they are several hundred

million light years long composed of

lacing entwined branches and clumps of

galaxies the largest stretch across the

heavens for up to 10 billion light years

and their enormous volume is matched

only by their Mass a typical

supercluster can hold over 10 million

billion Suns worth of

material the nearest superclusters are

named simply for the constellation we

have to peer through to map them the

coma the Virgo the Hydra Centaurus the

Pavo Indus more distant ones are usually

given simple catalog designations unless

they break some record in size or

distance for example the king Gora

supercluster one of the most massive yet

mapped was discovered in 2022 by a team

of Japanese scientists who named it

after the three-headed Nemesis of

Godzilla but despite the Monstrous size

of these super clusters their ability to

Encompass hundreds of thousands of

galaxies at once the way they Bridge

across light years with strings of

dazzling

points they are

small for there is a far larger far more

menacing class of entity inhabiting our

Cosmos the true largest objects in the

UN

Universe are

nothing these are no Titans of ancient

myth or kaijus of modern Cinema they the

opposite the shadow in the dark for most

of our universe is

void

nothingness there are no lights to trace

their structure no gaseous filament to

highlight their nature we can only

detect them through their

absence the cosmic voids are the single

largest objects in the Universe they

Define the superclusters they Define our

existence everything we know and love

our home solar system our galaxy our

supercluster all exists suspended on the

edge of the

abyss and they are the ultimate Destiny

of everything in the universe

the first Universe simulations run on

computers were in the 1960s nbody

simulations able to simulate about 100

bodies at a time a far cry from the

recent Flamingo Universe simulation with

300 billion elements and certainly not

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[Music]

YouTube the year was 1978 and

astronomers Le Thompson and Steven

Gregory had set themselves in exhausting

task staying up all night for nearly a

week at the kit Peak Observatory located

southeast of Tucson Arizona they were

painstakingly recording the positions of

dozens of

galaxies after confirming the positions

of these galaxies on the sky they then

fed the light from their telescope into

a simple tube that electronically

Amplified it the Forerunner of the

modern-day digital camera this

technology allowed them to access

exceptionally dim and distant galaxies

far G than the reach they could normally

get they were peering further into the

universe than any astronomer had before

once Amplified they then pass the light

from the Galaxy into a spectrometer and

from there Thompson and Gregory could

measure the red shift of the galaxies

using that to work out the distance

there were no computers no sophisticated

algorithms no utation Thompson and

Gregory were performing a survey of

galaxies by manually recording their

positions and distances of course they

were not the first to perform such a

task astronomers had been carefully

mapping Galaxy positions for decades but

Thomson and Gregory had two tricks up

their sleeves two techniques previously

unapplied to

cosmology one was their use of light

amplification but their second trick

wasn't one of technology or Theory or

even deep Insight it was a plot a method

of displaying the positions of their

Newfound galaxies the plot looked like a

slice of pizza putting the Earth at the

pointy Apex and broadening outwards as

the distances from the earth grew though

the idea may not seem important it was

revolutionary because it allowed

Thompson and Gregory to place the large

scales of the universe in context

condensing the information into an

easily digestable format the plan for

their survey was to map the galaxies in

and around the coma cluster known for

decades as a dens gation of galaxies

they hope to use their results to find

differences between galaxies that were

members of the cluster and those that

were in the field the random scattering

of galaxies thought to be strewn about

the

universe but instead they found

something

[Music]

else a vast empty region devoid of any

galaxies a patch millions of light years

wide that should have been full of

galaxies but

wasn't a floor in the

cosmos the new technique for plotting

the positions of galaxies made it too

obvious to ignore a dense collection of

black dots represent the coma cluster a

smattering of Dots here and there

surrounding it and in the

middle

nothing and so they gave a name to this

blank

space a void

when Thompson and Gregory published

their work the astronomical Community

was skeptical and sometimes outright

hostile we've already taken the measure

of the heavens they argued and galaxies

inhabited the whole of the cosmos the

pair of astronomers had clearly made a

mistake perhaps they had some flaw in

the design of their survey or maybe

their eyes were simply deceiving them

they wanted to see a void where there

was none driven by their desire to make

a dramatic Discovery no matter what