2023-09-12 20:51:37
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The research team was the first to fully map the spherical superstructure. It’s practically right on our doorstep.
Manoa – The Big Bang and the creation of the universe occurred around 13.8 billion years ago. From a human perspective, it was an almost unimaginably long time ago. A research team’s find is almost as old. The spherical formation, a collection of increased galaxy density, that the team discovered was formed just 400,000 years following the Big Bang. This makes it a veritable fossil and possibly a unique find.
Cosmic fossil: Research team discovers superstructure from the time of the Big Bang
The research team believes “this may be the first time that astronomers have identified an individual structure associated with a BAO,” according to an article on the website the University of Hawaii. The abbreviation BAO stands for Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation and describes the wave-like propagation of plasma shortly following the Big Bang. These density waves “petrified,” so to speak, when the connection between matter and radiation collapsed.
Although the formation, which the researchers named “Ho’oleilana,” was already mentioned in a 2016 research paper, this would not have revealed the full extent of the structure or identified it as BAO. This may be partly due to the sheer size of “Ho’oleilana”.
Illustration of the BAO “Hoʻoleilana” discovered by the Hawaiian research team (left, in red). Adjacent to it is the Laniakea supercluster, which also contains the Milky Way. © Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio; Daniel Pomarède, IRFU, CEA University Paris-Saclay. This work benefited from a government funding by France 2030 (P2I – Graduate School of Physics) under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0003.
Gigantic superstructure “Ho’oleilana” is a billion light-years across
Even with data from Cosmicflows-4, the largest compilation of precise distances to galaxies to date according to the university website, Ho’oleilana is “so large that it extends to the edge of the sector of the sky we study,” explains astronomer Brent Tully . The size of the density sphere is a gigantic billion light years.
This means that it dwarfs other giant structures that have already been discovered. For example, the 1.4 billion light-year-large Boötes supercluster is located inside “Ho’oleilana”. “It was a fantastic process to create this map and see how the giant shell structure of Hoʻoleilana is composed of elements that have themselves been identified in the past as some of the largest structures in the universe,” the university website quotes Daniel Pomarede of the CEA Paris-Saclay, the team’s cartographer.
Research team locates cosmic fossil “Ho’oleilana” in our immediate neighborhood
All of this makes it all the more astonishing that the mega-structure is practically in our cosmic neighborhood. “Ho’oleilana” borders the Laniakea supercluster, which, among other things, also contains our home, the Milky Way, as the science magazine says scinexx reported.
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The newly discovered BAO also allows conclusions to be drawn regarding the speed at which the universe is expanding. “The remnants of these waves form a ruler that, observed over time in the evolving universe, provides clues to the physics governing cosmic evolution,” says the paper, which the research team published in Astrophysical Journal published.
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