Meet Quipu, a new contender for the largest known structure in the universe.
It’s essentially a giant cluster of galaxy clusters stretching approximately 1.3 billion light-years long - more than 13,000 times the length of our Milky Way. It consists of 200 quadrillion solar masses. And as if that weren’t impressive enough, Quipu and four other similar structures encompass 30 percent of the galaxies, 45 percent of the galaxy clusters, 25 percent of the matter and 13 percent of the overall volume of the known universe.
These five superstructures were described in a preprint paper published on the server arXiv last week. The paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
In Quipu, “there is one main strand of clusters of galaxies from which many strands depart,” astrophysicist Alfredo Carpineti writes for IFL Science.
Despite being in first place, Quipu is not short on competition. At ten billion light-years long, the Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall is technically the largest known structure in the universe, with a catch: It hasn’t been confirmed as a single, interconnected thing, as Hans Böhringer, an astrophysicist with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and a co-author of the study, told EarthSky.
As the cosmos evolves, Quipu and the other described superstructures might eventually pull apart “into several collapsing units,” the researchers say. As a result, these structures are transient. “But,” the team adds, “at present they are special physical entities with characteristic properties and special cosmic environments deserving special attention.”