Scientists made a discovery in space that makes the Earth look like a particle.
At play here is a formation that has been named the “BOSS Great Wall”. This formation is – just as the name suggests – a kind of “wall”, composed of many superclusters or a huge collection of nebulae. Nebulae, such as the Milky Way, gather into clusters due to gravity, and these clusters then gather into superclusters.
This one has a size of 1 light year, the largest object ever found in the universe.
Biggest in universe
This formation consists of 830 separate nebulae and its mass is 10,000 times greater than the mass of the Milky Way, says New Scientist . It’s hard to imagine such a size, but to try to put this into some context, the Earth orbits a single star, our Sun. Apart from it, there are more than 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, and around all these stars there are an unknown number of planets.
Multiply this by 10,000 and the result is BOSS.
More super-morphs in the universe
BOSS stands for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and it was a team of astrophysicists from the Canary Islands who published an article about the discovery in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Found between 4.5 and 6.5 billion light-years away, this giant morphotype can be useful for research into how the universe formed after the Big Bang. A similar but smaller form has been found before and is called the Sloan Great Wall. And as recently as 2014, scientists discovered that our Milky Way belongs to a supercluster they named Laniakea.
