Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard

Science - Large Scale Structure of the Universe

 

Filaments & Walls

Filaments are long, thin structures of galaxies like threads, much longer than their cross sections.  Walls are much wider but flatter than filaments.  They can span up to half a billion Megaparsecs in length,.  Here are some examples. 
The Standard Model cannot account for such large structures, so in the actual cosmology it is hypothesized that such structures as the Great Wall form along and follow web-like threads of dark matter. It is thought that this dark matter dictates the structure of the Universe on the grandest of scales. Dark matter gravitationally attracts baryonic matter, and it is this normal matter that astronomers see forming long, thin filaments and walls of super-galactic clusters.
Pisces-Cetus Filament
The Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex is a galaxy filament that includes the Virgo Supercluster, to which our galaxy,  the Milky Way, belongs.  It is over 300 Mpc long, and nearly 50 Mpc wide. 
Perseus-Pegasus Filament
Adjacent to the Pisces-Cetus filament, it includes the Perseus-Pisces Superclusters, and is, again, around 300 Mpc long.
Sloan Great Wall
The Sloan Great Wall was first identified in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and is probably the largest structure in the known Universe.  It is around 433 Mpc (c. 1.4 billion light years) long, and around 300 Mpc away, though estimates do vary.  Some parts of it are not gravitationally bound together and and may never be, so in some ways, we should not really consider it as a single coherent structure.  Nevertheless, it is impressive.  Shown in the image to the right with the Shapley Supercluster, and parts of the Pisces-Cetus and Horologium-Reticulum Superclusters.
Great (Coma) Wall
Found in 1989, the Great Wall (also called the Coma Wall), is the next largest knownstructure in the Universe. It is a 250 Mpc long, 30 Mpc wide and 6 Mpc thick.  It could extend much farther but the gas and dust in the Milky Way's zone of avoidance obscures what can be seen. 
Centaurus Wall
Conjectural, but could contain the Great Attractor, the Norma Supercluster, the Virgo Supercluster (including the Milky Way and the Local Group of galaxies), as well as the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster. 
Sculptor Wall
The map to the right shows the position of the Sculptor Wall, the red curved line, in relation to the Milky Way, which is at the bottom.  Courtesy HyperLeda (university of Lyon, France).  Towards the bottom, and to the right of the Sculptor Wall, from approximately 100 to 300 light-years, there is a rectangular region with a very low density of galaxies.  This is called the Sculptor Void.
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