Scientists have just discovered a gigantic structure behind the Milky Way

A spectacular three-dimensional map of the universe showed us one of the largest cosmic structures ever discovered - a 1.4 billion light-year long wall of hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

The wall of the South Pole (South Pole Wall) was right in front of our noses. Nobody, however, has not noticed her until now, because its significant tracts are half a billion light years away from us behind the bright Milky Way. The South Pole Wall competes with the Great Wall of Sloan, the sixth largest structure discovered in the universe.

The large-scale structure of the universe

Astronomers have long ago discovered that galaxies are not randomly distributed throughout the universe. They connect to each other in a kind of cosmic network consisting of extensive hydrogen gas fibers, onto which galaxies are strung like pearls on a necklace. There are unusually empty spaces between the fibers.

Mapping these intergalactic fibers is the main task of cosmography, a specific mapping of the entire cosmos.

As part of previous cosmographic work, scientists created maps of other galaxy densities, such as the current record holder, the Great Wall of Hercules-the Northern Crown. It extends over 10 billion light years, or more than 10% of the diameter of the observable universe.

Our large-scale environment

In 2014, Daniel Pomerade, a cosmographer at the University of Paris-Saclay, discovered the Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, including the Milky Way, in which we find ourselves. Laniakea is 520 million light years long and has a mass of about 100 bld (yes, billions) of solar masses.

Wall of the South Pole

To create a new map, researchers used the latest sky reviews, which allowed them to look into the so-called Galactic Shading Zone. This is an area visible in the sky visible from the southern hemisphere, in which the bright light of the Milky Way effectively obscures most of the objects behind it.

Cosmographers usually determine the distance to observed objects by means of redshift, i.e. the speed at which given speed moves away from us due to the expansion of the universe. This time, however, in addition to the redshift itself, astronomers also took into account the movement of galaxies in their galactic environment, where one galaxy acts gravitational to the other.

By using this method, you can discover a hidden mass that gravitatively affects the movement of galaxies, and thus you can search for dark matter. Thanks to advanced algorithms analyzing the own movements of galaxies in galactic catalogs, researchers were able to reproduce the three-dimensional distribution of matter both within and around the Galactic Veil Zone.

The resulting map presents a huge concentration of matter around the southern pole of the sky with a vast wing extending north on one side towards the constellation of the Whale and the other, shorter towards the constellation of the Bird of Paradise.

Knowing what the universe looks like on such a huge scale allows scientists to check current cosmological models, 'says Neta Bahcall, astrophysicist at Princeton University. The problem is that so far scientists have not been able to determine where this extensive structure begins and where it ends. However, we can wait a little longer, because as the researchers wrote in their article:

We will not know the full scale of this structure, and thus we will not know if it is unusual until we create a map of the entire universe on a much larger scale.

Scientists have just discovered a gigantic structure behind the Milky Way