Astronomers Find Largest Structure in the Universe
An international team of astronomers has found the largest known structure in the universe – a group of quasars four billion light years across. Quasars are the nuclei of extremely ancient galaxies that can flare up brightly, making them visible across huge distances, for comparatively brief period of between 10 and 100 million years. They tend to group together in structures known as large quasar groups or LQGs. And the biggest of these, says the team, is enormous.
Indeed, the structure is so big that it clalleges current theories of cosmology. The Cosmological Principle assumes that the universe, when viewed at a sufficiently large scale, looks the same no matter where it’s observed from. Based on this, and the modern theory of cosmology, calculations suggest that astrophysicists shouldn’t be able to find a structure larger than 1.2 billion light years.