So the largest “thing” in the universe so far was just discovered—it’s big.
What’s the largest thing you can imagine? I mean, what can you visualize in the neocortex of the brain that your human ancestors gave you that takes up the most space and has the greatest mass?
My first instinct would be to say, a star. Most of us have probably seen relative scales of the size difference between Earth and the Sun. If you’ve also travelled abroad before and have seen how long and trying it is for even the most patron of saints, is pretty hard to comprehend their massive size.
Now, you have to think out of the box a little. What’s bigger than that? The answer is a solar system, and then even larger, a galaxy. After that, I mean we’re talking the universe, right?
Right?
Enter Hyperion, Zeus’s titanic uncle, according to Greek mythology. You know, pretty important guy. Hyperion is the biggest and oldest supercluster known to man to date.
A supercluster is a cluster of galaxies, but like Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer said of full demons, “they’re bigger.”
This isn’t just any old supercluster, either. Hyperion is a proto-supercluster. From the Greek word protos, meaning first, astronomers believe Hyperion was formed only two billion years after the big bang, while the milky way was formed about 13.8 billion.
Basically, we’re talking about the original, biggest, and baddest Titan among titans. I don’t even know how Zeus overthrew him and Cronus, but I have a feeling someone must have editorialized this along the way.
Top researchers from all over the globe working at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered Hyperion with its own VLT, or Very Large Telescope. The actual volume of the supercluster clocks in at 9.5 × 10^4 cMpc^3, which, according to the press release, means, “the proto-supercluster is calculated to be more than one million billion times that of the sun.”
But, guess what? It turns out that Hyperion was even bigger in the past! Due to its massive size and old age, Hyperion has actually been contracting from its own gravity.
“Hyperion is like 5,000 galaxies of the milky way,” Steffan Miefke, chief of operations for the ESO, told Reuters. “Hyperion is a sixth of the age of the universe. It’s as though we were able to look at the adolescence of an 80-year-old human being.”
While the ESO itself is German, the VLT sits in the Chilean desert. The VLT uses what’s known as Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph. According to Reuters, this allows researchers a “time machine in the middle of desert, showing us how the universe looked when it was just a third of its current age.”
What’s more is Hyperion is 11 billion light years away. That is so far away from the VLT that it is viewed from Earth as it looked billions of years ago.
“Superclusters closer to Earth tend to (appear as) a much more concentrated distribution of mass with clear structural features,” said Brian Lemaux, astronomer and co-author of the report, told Reuters. “But in Hyperion, the mass is distributed much more uniformly in a series of connected blobs, populated by loose associations of galaxies.”
Basically, when viewing this bad boy from the telescope, it appears rather sparse and spread out which suggests its not only enormous but a great distance away, as well. Who knows what secrets lie in the heart of such a big, old web of galaxies? Astronomers are hopeful this wise old giant will spill the beans on how our big, whole universe came to fruition.
“These are galaxies very far from us, almost at the beginning of the universe, and allow us to understand better how the universe evolved from the Big Bang until the present day,” Miefke said.
