A research team discovers a giant cosmic fossil

The research team was the first to fully map the spherical superstructure. It’s practically on our doorstep.

Manoa – The Big Bang occurred and created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago. From a human point of view, that long ago was almost unimaginable. The research team’s discovery is almost as old. The globular formation, a group of increasingly dense galaxies that the team discovered, formed just 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This makes it a true fossil and possibly a unique find.

Cosmic Fossil: The research team has discovered superstructures from the time of the Big Bang

The research team believes “this may be the first time astronomers have identified a single structure associated with the BAO,” according to an article on website University of Hawaii. The abbreviation BAO stands for Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation and describes the wave-like propagation of plasma shortly after the Big Bang. These density waves “petrified”, so to speak, when the relationship between matter and radiation broke down.

Although the formation, which the researchers named “Ho’oleilana,” had already been mentioned in a 2016 paper, this would not have revealed the full extent of the structure and would not have identified it as a BAO. This may be due in part to the “Ho’oleilana”‘s massive size.

The giant superstructure “Ho’oleilana” is a billion light-years across

Even using data from Cosmicflows-4, the largest collection of precise galaxy distances to date, according to the university’s website, Ho’oleilana “is so large that it extends to the edge of the strip of sky we studied,” he explains. Astronomer Brent Tully. The density ball is a giant billion light-years in size.

This means that it dwarfs other megastructures that have already been discovered. For example, the 1.4 billion light-year-wide Boötes supercluster lies within Ho’oleilana. “It has been a fascinating process to create this map and see how the giant shell structure of Ho’oleilana is composed of elements that have been historically identified as some of the largest structures in the universe,” Daniel Bomarede Paris of the CEA is quoted as saying on the university’s website. -Saclay, team cartographer.

The research team has located the cosmic fossil “Ho’oleilana” in our immediate vicinity

All of this makes it even more surprising that this massive structure exists practically in our cosmic neighborhood. “Ho’oleilana” lies on the border of the Laniakea supercluster, in which, among other things, science magazine says, our home, the Milky Way, is located. com.scinexx mentioned.