The Universe’s Largest Structure Is Even Bigger Than We Expected

If you thought the cosmic web was tangled enough, think again. A team of astrophysicists recently used gamma-ray bursts—those spectacular, enigmatic explosions of energy from the farthest reaches of the cosmos—to reveal that the largest-known structure in the universe may be even larger than previously thought. The structure is the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, a filament of galaxy groups and clusters that spans about 10 billion light-years across. The structure’s new size estimate is causing fresh headaches for standard cosmological models, as it appears even larger than the previous high estimate of about 9.8 billion light-years. In a new study—not yet peer-reviewed and hosted on the preprint server arXiv—a joint Hungarian-American research team led by István Horváth of Budapest’s University of Public Service scanned the sky for patterns. The team used a dataset of 542 gamma-ray bursts with known redshifts, essentially meaning their distances are known. The bursts are basica ... Read full article.