1,173,139,200,000,000, 000,000 miles

By Aussiegirl

If my math is correct, this is the distance across the largest known structure in the universe, according to this article. However, this is just a brief jaunt across town in comparison with the size of the universe itself. But here it seems to get tricky, because according to this article in Wikipedia on the observable universe, size figures may differ according to various factors. At any rate, here are some relevant paragraphs from that Wikipedia article:

The observable universe is a term used in physical cosmology to describe the maximum possible spatial extent of the Universe, as calculated from the space-time radius of curvature, and other astrophysical standards such as quasar distributions.

Both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term "universe" when they really mean "observable universe". The reason for this is that unobservable physical phenomena are scientifically irrelevant; that is, they cannot affect any events that we can perceive, and therefore causally do not exist. They also cannot be measured, and therefore hypotheses about parts of the universe that are not observable may be ignored.

In the sense of a comoving distance scaled to the current conditions, the universe is 13.7 billion light years in radius because the universe is 13.7 billion years old. However, space itself may expand faster than the speed of light making the physical size associated with this much larger. This occurs when space expands while a photon is in transit, hence the photon must traverse a proper distance which is greater than the Hubble distance, or the traditionally defined edge of the observable universe.

There is some disagreement as to exactly how large the observable universe in proper distance is: a study of the cosmic microwave background radiation by WMAP in May 2004 states the universe is at least 78 billion light years in radius, yet the March 2005 issue of Scientific American cites a figure of 46 billion light years in every direction. The ambiguity in size is dependent on the detailed models of Hubble's law, especially the nonlinear nature of dark energy component of the universe which is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In practice, we can only observe objects as far as the surface of last scattering 300,000 years after the big bang when the universe had cooled sufficiently to permit electrons to bind to atomic nuclei, which brought a halt to the Compton scattering of ambient photons, meaning that the photons can survive long enough to reach Earth. However, it may be possible to infer information from before this time through the detection of gravitational waves

Universe Today � Archive � The Largest Structure in the Universe

The Largest Structure in the Universe
July 27th, 2006

A team of astronomers using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea has discovered giant, three-dimensional filaments of galaxies extending across 200 million light-years of space. These filaments, which formed a mere 2 billion years after the birth of the universe, are the largest-known structures ever discovered. They are studded with more than 30 large concentrations of gas, each up to ten times as massive as our own galaxy. These giant gas clouds are probably the progenitors of the most massive galaxies that exist in the universe today.

This finding is very important because it gives researchers new insight into the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Astronomers expect the universe to look relatively smooth 2 billion years after the birth of the universe. In summarizing the importance of this finding, astronomer Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University said, “Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe. The structure we discovered and others like it are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies.”

Giant 3D Filaments of Galaxies
The research group used the Subaru telescope to make a detailed study of a region of sky 12 billion light-years from Earth that is known to have a large concentration of galaxies. They used Subaru’s Suprime-cam camera outfitted with special filters designed to be sensitive to the light from galaxies at that distance. The results showed that this concentration of galaxies is just a small portion of a much larger structure.

The newly found giant structure extends over 200 million light years and has a concentration of galaxies up to four times denser than the universe’s average. The only previous known structures with such a high density are much smaller, measuring about 50 million light-years in scale.

Using Subaru’s Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) to study the 3D distribution of galaxies in this filament, the team also discovered at least three overlapping filaments that make up the giant structure.

Large Concentrations of Gas
Astronomers knew this region contained at least two large concentrations of gas. One of them, extends across 400,000 light-years. A comparison with the Andromeda Galaxy, thought to be about the same size as the Milky Way Galaxy, shows the relative immensity of this gas structure.

The researchers found that these large concentrations of gas are located near the overlap regions of the filaments.

The Subaru observations were successful in finding much fainter objects than previously discovered in this region. For example, they found 33 new large concentrations of gas along the filamentary structure extending across 100,000 light-years. This is the first time that so many large concentrations of gas, known to astronomers as Lyman alpha blobs, have been discovered in the distant universe.

Astronomers think that such Lyman alpha blobs, named so since they are seen in the Lyman alpha emission line of hydrogen, are probably related to the births of the largest galaxies. In the “gravitational heating” model, the blobs are regions where gas is collapsing under its own gravity to form a galaxy. The”photoionization” model attributes emission from the gas to ionization by ultraviolet light from newborn stars or a massive black hole. The “shock heating” or “galactic superwind” model hypothesizes that the glow of the gas is caused by the death of many massive stars born early in the history of the universe, living out short lives, and then dying in supernova explosions that blow out surrounding gas. Team members Yoshiaki Taniguchi and Yasuhiro Shioya (Ehime University) have been advocating for the galactic superwind model.

Observations with the DEIMOS spectrograph at the Keck II telescope revealed that the gas inside the blobs move with speeds greater that 500 kilometers per second (300 miles per second). The extent of the gas concentrations and the speed of the material within them suggest that these regions must be up to ten times as massive as the Milky Way Galaxy.

The blobs show a great variety in shape and brightness. For example, some show bubble-like features that match computer simulations of galactic winds such as those by Masao Mori (Senshu University) and Masayuki Umemura (University of Tsukuba). There are also diffuse blobs and those consisting of several galaxies.

“Galaxies of various sizes surround us,” said Yuichi Matsuda of Kyoto University.”The large gas concentrations we found may tell us a lot about how the largest of these came to be.”

These results were published in a series of research papers in the Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal