Posted on 07/30/2006 8:22:20 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.
The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.
The galaxies within the newly found structure are packed together four times closer than the universe's average.
Some of the gas bubbles are up to 400,000 light years across, nearly twice the diameter of our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. Scientists think they formed when massive stars born early in the history of the universe exploded as supernovas and blew out their surrounding gases. Another theory is that the bubbles are giant gas cocoons that will one day give birth to new galaxies.
The finding will give researchers new insight into what the structure of cosmos looks like at the largest scale.
"Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said study team member Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University.
"The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies," Yamauchi said.
Coffee | nose
Owie...
Burt Bacharach, 1958
LOL!
(check my tagline)
Great pic. Ted is so drunk he's not even trying to negotiate the cones and yellow tape. He's just got his bloodshot eyes locked on his car in the parking lot. He probably dragged the cones and yellow tape clear to his beach house.
A caller to the Art Bell Show last night stated that hydrogen is the smallest atom. This is not strictly true. In fact hydrogen is one of the largest. It is the one with least mass, however.
Ya, leaded or unleaded??? Maybe it's got some potential...
Guillermo Gonzalez & Jay W Richards, The Privileged Planet
Really!! Weren't paying attention in chemistry class, were you?
They didn't give you the real info in chem class.
All this structure was merely quantum irregularity in the primordial blob, which was smaller than a single hydrogen atom to start with. Now these blobs are millions of light years across: hardly to be thought of as being blown together.
Looks like we don't do science very well anymore on FR.
It has an atomic radius of 37pm. The only one smaller is He, with an atomic radius of 31pm, everything else is larger. Oxygen, for example, has a radius of 73pm. I don't know what you are using to determine that it is the largest.
It wasn't a singularity. It weighed twenty pounds and was very small. It had quantum irregularities that inflation magnified a bazillion times in a small part of a second.
No kidding. Any thread about astronomy now "must" (is it in the bylaws?) have the obligatory pics of Moore and Kennedy - just waiting for the Uranus joke.
Start here. Good stuff:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#BBevidence
Thanks for the ping my friend.
Intersting article, stupid thread.
They say that science education in the US has fallen to twelfth place or so in the world. I wouldn't doubt it. There were complaints even in England that they were closing physics departments in English public schools, but it is happening here, too. It's a symptom.
Welcome to the world of feel good education, extreme whacko environmentalism, no kid left behind (dumb down education to the smallest denominator - I had personal experience with this one), teach only "fun stuff", science and math are too hard, and so on.
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