South Pole Wall: One of ‘biggest cosmic structures’ discovered by astronomers, see pics

Scientists have discovered one of the biggest cosmic structures, a south pole wall stretching 1.4 billion light-years across hundreds of thousands of galaxies. In a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal researchers revealed a 3D map of the universe that shows the mammoth wall behind the bright Milky Way galaxy that rivals The Sloan Great Wall in size which is 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers away and is known as the sixth largest and the "biggest cosmic structure" discovered ever. 

According to the scientists, the wall had been concealed and went undetected in the past owing to its large parts that are tugged away some half a billion light-years away. Further, the discovery confirms that the galaxies are clumped together as the cosmic web and aren’t scattered like previously thought of. Scientists have found that the galaxies were rather merged together in enormous strands of hydrogen gas and surround the gigantic and largely empty voids around its woven compact structure.

Study researcher Daniel Pomarede, a cosmographer at Paris-Saclay University in France was quoted saying that the intergalactic threads that were located in the field of cosmography, known as the cartography of the cosmos, were mapped. It was discovered that the recent wall was held like the galactic assemblies revealed in previous cosmographic work such as the very recent Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which was more than a tenth the size of the visible universe and approximately 10 billion light-years away.  

A team of astronomers studied the region called the Zone of Galactic Obscuration, a southern region of the sky where most bright lights from the Milky Way are blocked. In the study, the researchers observed a detailed new map that used the newly-created sky surveys to peer into this dark region. Using redshift, a technology Cosmographers use to study distance to objects and the speed at which objects recede from Earth due to expansion of the universe, scientists found the approximate distance of the wall from the Milky Way Galaxy.

“The farther away an object is, the faster it will appear to be receding from Earth, an observation first made by astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929 and which has held up ever since,” Pomarede and his colleagues who unveiled the Laniakea supercluster, noted in a study in 2014, as per another study published in a scientific journal. Composed of the mass of 100 million billion suns, Lanaikea was found to be some 520 million light-years away in the space by Pomarede.  

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Ran algorithms in galactic catalogs

However, in a slight shift to the technique, Pomarede took into account the velocity of galaxies and measurement that included not only the redshift but also the motion of galaxies as they exerted the gravitational force against each other, as per the study. For the reason that these measurements could detect hidden mass that influenced galaxies movement, and therefore, uncovered dark matter in the process. The team ran algorithms in the galactic catalogs that recorded peculiar galactic movements across the three-dimensional distribution of matter and in and around the Zone of Galactic Obscuration. On July 9, they published the results in the journal, saying, that they discovered the South Pole Wall whose entirety was yet to be ascertained. Until the universe was mapped on a significantly grander scale, the wall will be a mystery to its full extent, researchers noted in the study.  

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(Images Credit: NASA/ The Astrophysical Journal)