The Boss Great Wall Is the Largest Cosmic Structure Ever Discovered

The Boss Great Wall is the largest cosmic structure ever discovered. It owes its origin to a super huge cloud of gas that collects in the early universe. But why does this material clump together here in the first place? Astronomers believe that the answer lies at the moment of the universe's creation. At a time when everything in existence fits into a space far smaller than an atom. The tiniest sliver of a fraction of a second after the big bang, 110 trillion trillionth of a second, the universe underwent an inflationary period where it went from about the size of a proton, a subatomic particle, to

roughly the size of a grain of sand. Now, I know that doesn't sound like much, but you got to realize this is a factor of a million billion times. This is a huge expansion. This moment of inflation sews the seed that grows into the Great Wall. Trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the cosmos is a ball of energy where weirdness rules. Minute random fluctuations in this super hot soup create a pattern of hotspots on subatomic scales. As the universe expands, it stretches out the tiny hot spots over a cosmic scale, energy condenses into matter, which provides the seeds

for huge cosmic structures like the clouds of hydrogen that feed the galaxies and the Great Wall. The inflation of the universe pulled parts of the universe that were close together wildly apart. If you had a region of the universe that had a little bit more stuff in it than average next to a spot that had a little bit less stuff than average, given enough time, they would have smoothed each other out. But the inflation of the universe ripped them apart and they became frozen in place. Tiny fluctuations at the moment of the universe's creation. unlock the genesis of the largest structure in the cosmos. What is the invisible force that molds trillions of stars into the Great Wall's distinctive shape?

The Great Wall is 6 billion lightyear from Earth. This is too far away for telescopes to see in detail how it joins together. But clues exist closer to home that can help astronomers unlock the mystery. Despite its ridiculous size and forbidding distance, the Great Wall is made of the same things we see around us. We can learn about that and then extrapolate that to understand how the Great Wall itself behaves. Our Milky Way galaxy is just one of a cluster of over 30 closely spaced galaxies known as the local group. And the local group is just a single fragment of an even greater collection of hundreds of galaxy clusters.

Astronomers call this type of structure a supercluster. The Milky Way is part of a supercluster that is 100 million light years wide. And superclusters pop up everywhere that astronomers look. Almost every galaxy is part of a supercluster and there are millions of these superclusters in the universe. Each one of them has tens to hundreds of thousands of galaxies in them. And each one of those galaxies has billions of stars. The supercluster is the key that unlocks why the Great Wall has its distinctive shape. The Great Wall measures 1 billion lightyears across.

Breaking it apart reveals that it is a cluster of four superclusters. Two of them are large, densely packed tubes, each more than 500 million lightyear long, and two are smaller superclusters, each over a thousand times the mass of the Milky Way. These superclusters join together to form a true heavyweight champion of the cosmos. The largest single object we have ever seen. Astronomers now know that nine out of 10 galaxies sit inside a supercluster. What mysterious force brings galaxies together into these vast structures?

A clue lies in the way that everything moves through the universe. Objects attract each other. The more massive the object, the greater the pull. Scientists call this force gravity. If the universe is a symphony, then gravity is its great conductor. It choreographs the dance of everything in the cosmos. It brings clouds of gas together to form stars, stars together to form galaxies, and galaxies together to form clusters, including the Great Wall. It sounds simple. Gravity pulls objects together into ever larger structures. But there's a big problem with this idea. From the Big Bang to the galaxies that we see today,

computers can simulate how the cosmos evolved. When scientists simulate the formation of superclusters, these mega structures end up loose as gravity isn't strong enough. Only when they boost the gravity beyond the expected level does matter assemble fast enough to form the superclusters that we see today. So how can objects like the Great Wall form if gravity is too weak? The only force in the universe that we know that brings things together is gravity. When it comes to structures as large as the Great Wall, there just isn't enough gravity in the galaxies together to form something that huge. Something else must be there underlying all of it, creating

more gravity than we can account for. Where is the missing gravity that the universe needs to make the Great Wall? And is the Great Wall unique? Or is it part of an even larger cosmic structure? The Boss Great Wall is a vast collection of galaxies that stretches over 1 billion lightyears across. Scientists calculate that the gravity of its thousands of galaxies alone is too weak to build this immense mega structure. Where does the extra gravity that's needed to construct the Great Wall come from? Scientists believe that a clue lies in the space around galaxies. Gravity doesn't just pull on matter, it also bends light. When powerful telescopes photograph dense galaxy clusters,

the objects around them look distorted. This warping of spaceime by a giant cluster of galaxies can act like an optical lens that magnifies the light of galaxies beyond it. These strange smeared out images all over the sky. These are real. This is actually what you would see if your eyes were sensitive enough. You would see this in the night sky. But sometimes something weird happens. The light that comes from behind galaxies bends far more than astronomers expect. There must be an invisible material with huge mass and gravity around these galaxies.

This material could unlock where the extra gravity comes from to build mega structures like the Great Wall. Scientists call it dark matter and they estimate that it outweighs regular matter by a factor of 5 to 1.