The largest objects in the Universe and the Big Bang theory

Today in our scientific section we will talk to you about big, very big things. In fact, we’re going to tell you what the biggest objects we’ve seen are because Alberto Aparisi told us that today’s topic is “the largest objects in the universe.”

It makes sense that we are not talking about a “giant bean dish” or even a “very large planet.” All this would be microscopic on the larger scale of the Universe. In this case, the largest “objects” in the Universe are swarms of galaxies. Groups of millions of galaxies that seem to have some kind of connection with each other. And the interesting thing about this exercise is that when we do it, we see some things that shouldn’t be there.

The interest in finding these groups of giant galaxies is to try to see the “face of the Universe.” The universe is made up of galaxies and gas clouds, but a galaxy in the universe is very small. If we look at one galaxy, we don’t get much information about what the Universe is like. It would be… like looking at the pores of the skin on a person’s face.

They are very interesting galaxiesbut if we want to look at the “universe” we have to zoom out a little. Start seeing thousands of galaxies, or better yet, millions of galaxies. We are entering the realm of truly large objects.

If you want, I’ll give it to you top 3 largest objects What we were able to observe:

In third place we have the “Large Giant Group of Quasars”, which spans 4 billion light years from end to end. And now that I think about it, it would be helpful for us to have some kind of reference to get an idea of ​​how big this is.

Let’s use a trick that I really like: let’s use football fields to measure the universe. Let’s imagine that the Milky Way is a football field. On this scale The solar system would be the size of a bacterium.

And on such a scale, the “Giant Great Group of Quasars” would occupy all of Spain and all of France. Together. Remember, the galaxy is a football field. So I think we can say that it is very big.

The winners of the competition were:

In second place is the “Great GRB Ring,” which on this scale corresponds to the entire eastern United States, from Florida to the Great Lakes.

And in first place we have the “Great Wall of Hercules and the Northern Crown”, which in our metaphor of football fields would be the size of all of Europe, right up to Moscow.

But now that I’ve told you all this, I also have to tell you a little trick. What listeners should know is that the “photographs” we have of these huge groups of galaxies are of very low quality. They are so large that, by necessity, most of these galaxies are very far away from us and we cannot see them.

Of these huge structures we only see brightest galaxiesand sometimes not even that: we see large explosions that occurred in one of these galaxies. This means that we have 70 galaxies, 30, 20… And hey, that’s very good, because thanks to these galaxies, we know that these bigars exist, but we have a very poor understanding of them. Do we see the “face of the Universe”? Perhaps, but we only see a few pixels of this face.

This is true! Well, it all ties back to what we’ve been talking about all along: Thanks to these structures, we begin to see the “face of the Universe.”and it turns out that this is not the face we expected. We can say that… we didn’t expect him to have such a big nose and mouth. Before these discoveries over the last ten years, we expected to find large groups of galaxies, but not this large.

Well, for a reason that is easy to understand: according to big bang theoryThe universe arose from a “primordial soup” that consisted only of particles and which must have been more or less the same everywhere. We didn’t expect the soup to be much spicier in the upper right corner or much colder in the southern part. The universe, if you take a couple of steps back and look at it from afar, should be the same everywhere, like the original soup. It’s called cosmological principle.

But of course, these large groups of galaxies that we discover tell us a slightly different story: in the Universe, even when viewed on the largest scales, there are still areas that are slightly more densely populated (these are large groups), and others that a little more crowded and empty. We did not end up with a “homogeneous soup of galaxies” as we expected.

Does this mean we have something wrong about the Big Bang theory? Does this mean that we misunderstand these large groups of which we only see a few galaxies? These are questions that we will have to answer by improving the quality of the photo, checking whether there really are pixels there that we could not see.