Judging by what astronomers managed to observe with their telescopes and other powerful tools, the Universe is so big that it defies human comprehension. Measuring about 93 billion light-years for its diameter, the Universe’s observable part is home to trillions of galaxies. In fact, the whole Universe could be thousands of times bigger than the observable one, as light coming from the farthest corners didn’t have enough time to reach us during the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang.
Now that you got an idea of how insanely big the Universe is, you can conclude for yourself that a structure measuring 1.4 billion light-years is also pretty huge.
Meet the South Pole Wall
The South Pole Wall is the cosmic structure that’s also the subject for this article. By creating a 3D map of the Universe, researchers from the Paris-Saclay University managed to localize the new structure, which is made of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. The South Pole Wall was ‘found hiding in plain sight’, according to the scientists involved. More precisely, the structure was located within an area behind the Milky Way Galaxy, which is known as the Zone of Galactic Obscuration.
Neta Bahcall, is an astrophysicist from the Princeton University in New Jersey who wasn’t involved in the discovery. She declared for Live Science:
“When you look at the network of filaments and voids, it becomes a semantic question of what’s connected,”
The scientists involved still acknowledged that they may need further work regarding the insanely huge structure:
“We will not be certain of its full extent, nor whether it is unusual, until we map the universe on a significantly grander scale,”
This last statement makes us even more excited and eager to see further scientific conclusions. Luckily enough for us, the Universe does a pretty good job in hiding its wonders from us. It may someday reveal them all to humanity, as it did with some of them numerous times.
The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab9952