Saturday, January 12, 2013

Grandest Structure of the Universe Revealed!


This behemoth of a structure is 4.2 billion light-years across on it's widest side. In other words, it would take light (traveling at 5.9 trillion miles per year) the entire lifespan of our solar system to travel across this large quasar group. This is phenomenal considering that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a mere 100,000 light-years across.  According to cosmological theory however, this dense collection of 76 quasars and some centralized supermassive black holes, shouldn't be able to exist since our universe is relatively homogenous at such large-scale points of observations.

So, think for a moment about the implications of how large these figures really are. Let's say you decided to take up the full-time job of tallying up some of these incomprehensible numbers. If you began counting one million seconds for 16 hours a day and allowed for 8 hours of sleep each night, it would take you two weeks! Now, once that two weeks is up, you decide to broaden your horizons and count 1 billion seconds. Following the same regime, you would spend approximately 50 years to reach this number! Convert those seconds into billions of light-years (1 light-year is 5.9 trillion miles) and your have some slight sense of the scale we are talking about here. 

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