Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Large Scale Universal Structure

Outside of our home Local Cluster of galaxies, structure and symmetry exist on a larger scale. All the super clusters near ours (within a few billion light-years) are connected by strands of galaxies called filaments. These filaments form hexagon shaped galactic structure, the inner part being mainly void. Outside of these structures however, no such symmetry exists. But, a large "wall" of galaxies marks the largest known Universal structure. It is called Sloan's Great wall and is 1,370,000,000 light-years long and approximately 1,000,000,000 light-years form Earth.


Image showing filaments of galaxies creating structures such as superclusters and voids.


This image shows structure at billions of light-years including Sloan's great wall and other major shapes.

Images provided by Wikipedia.

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