Posted on Jul 13, 2020 in Astronomy, Cosmic Web, Milky Way Galaxy, Science
Our place in the Universe, for so long one of the core mysteries of the human Earthly existence, just got a little clearer and a bit more terrifying, according to Brent Tully at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. Tully leads an ongoing effort to map the distribution of galaxies around the Milky Way that recently discovered an immense structure in the vast cosmic web beyond Laniakea, a supercluster of galaxies and endless voids, including the Milky Way and a newly identified structure, the South Pole Wall.
“We wonder if the South Pole Wall is much bigger than what we see. What we have mapped stretches across the full domain of the region we have surveyed. We are early explorers of the cosmos, extending our maps into unknown territory,” Tully observed.
We have no idea where the map of the cosmos ultimately ends, says intrepid explorer and astrophysicist Martin Rees: “The volume of space-time within range of our telescopes—what astronomers have traditionally called ‘the universe’—is only a tiny fraction of the aftermath of the big bang. We’d expect far more galaxies located beyond the horizon, unobservable, each of which –along with any intelligences it hosts– will evolve rather like our own.”
“Hyperion” –A Titanic Relic From the Early Universe
Beyond the Laniakea Supercluster
The South Pole Wall lies immediately beyond the Laniakea Supercluster, named after the Hawaiian phrase for “immense heaven,” wrapping the region like an arm. The densest part of it lies in the direction of the Earth’s South Pole, inspiring the name. It extends in a great arc of 200 degrees–more than a semicircle–reaching well into the northern sky. The concentration at the South Pole lies at a distance of 500 million light years. Following the arm north, it folds inward to within 300 million light years of the Milky Way. Along the arm, galaxies are slowly moving toward the South Pole, and from there, across a part of the sky obscured from Earth by the Milky Way toward the dominant structure in the nearby universe, the Shapley connection,
Throughout the last 40 years, there has been a growing appreciation of patterns in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe, reminiscent of geographic features like mountain ranges and island archipelagos. The Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, is part of the small Local Group of galaxies, which in turn is a suburb of the Virgo cluster with thousands of galaxies. The Virgo cluster in turn is an outer component of an even larger conglomeration of many rich clusters of galaxies, collectively called the “Great Attractor” because of its immense gravitational pull. In 2014, the team mapped out the Laniakea Supercluster, the bundling of a hundred thousand galaxies over an even larger region, spanning 500 million light years.
The Cosmic Genome –New 3-D ‘History’ of the Universe Reveals Troublesome Cracks
As Large as the Sloan Great Wall
The South Pole Wall is as large as the Sloan Great Wall, one of the largest structures known in the Universe, but the new discovery is much closer.
“One might wonder how such a large and not-so distant structure remained unnoticed,” says University of Paris-Saclay cosmic cartographer Daniel Pomarede, one of the study’s lead authors. “This is due to its location in a region of the sky that has not been completely surveyed, and where direct observations are hindered by foreground patches of galactic dust and clouds. We have found it thanks to its gravitational influence, imprinted in the velocities of a sample of galaxies.”
Source: Daniel Pomarède et al. Cosmicflows-3: The South Pole Wall, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952
The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via University of Hawaii at Manoa and the New York Times
Image at top of the page: a visualization of the Laniakea supercluster, Tsaghkyan/Wikimedia Commons
Read about The Daily Galaxy editorial team here