R136a1 is the most massive star known to date in the universe. Credit & Copyright: Joannie Dennis / flickr, CC BY-SA.

Looking at the night sky, you understand that you are just a grain of sand in the vast expanse of space.

But, many of us may also wonder: what is the most massive object known to date in the universe?

In a sense, the answer to this question depends on what we mean by the word "object". Astronomers observe structures such as the Great Wall of Hercules-Northern Corona, a colossal filament of gas, dust and dark matter containing billions of galaxies. Its length is about 10 billion light years, so this structure can be named after the largest object. But not everything is so simple. The classification of this cluster as a unique object is problematic due to the fact that it is difficult to determine exactly where it begins and where it ends.

In fact, in physics and astrophysics, “object” is well defined, said Scott Chapman, an astrophysicist at Dalhousie University in Halifax:

“It is something that is bound together by its own gravitational forces, such as a planet, a star, or stars revolving around a common center of mass.

Using this definition it becomes a little easier to understand what is the most massive object in the universe. In addition, this definition can be applied to various objects depending on the scale under consideration.

Photo of Jupiter's north pole taken by Pioneer 11 in 1974. Credit & Copyright: NASA Ames.

To our relatively tiny species, the planet Earth, at 6 septillion kilograms, seems huge. But it's not even the largest planet in the solar system. Gas giants: Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter are much larger. The mass of Jupiter, for example, is 1.9 octillion kilograms. Researchers have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars, including many that make our gas giants look small. Discovered in 2016, HR2562 b is the most massive exoplanet, about 30 times more massive than Jupiter. At this size, astronomers are not sure whether it should be considered a planet or classified as a dwarf star.

In this case, the stars can grow to enormous sizes. The most massive known star is R136a1, its mass is between 265 and 315 times the mass of our Sun (2 nonillion kilograms). Located 130,000 light-years away from the Large Magellanic Cloud, our satellite galaxy, this star is so bright that the light it emits actually tears it apart. According to a 2010 study, the electromagnetic radiation emanating from a star is so powerful that it can carry away material from its surface, causing the star to lose about 16 Earth masses each year. Astronomers do not know exactly how such a star could form, and how long it will exist.

Enormous stars nestled in the stellar nursery RMC 136a in the Tarantula Nebula, in one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, 165,000 light-years away. Credit & Copyright: ESO / VLT.

The next massive objects are galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light-years across and contains about 200 billion stars, totaling about 1.7 trillion solar masses. However, the Milky Way cannot compete with the central galaxy of the Phoenix Cluster, located 2.2 million light years away and containing about 3 trillion stars. At the center of this galaxy is a supermassive black hole - the largest ever discovered - with an estimated mass of 20 billion suns. The Phoenix Cluster itself is a huge cluster of about 1000 galaxies with a total mass of about 2 quadrillion suns.

But even this cluster cannot compete with what is probably the most massive object ever discovered: the galactic protocluster known as SPT2349.

“We hit the jackpot by finding this structure,” said Chapman, leader of the team that discovered the new record holder. “More than 14 very massive individual galaxies located in space not much larger than our own Milky Way.”

An artist's illustration showing 14 galaxies that are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive cluster of galaxies. Credit & Copyright: NRAO / AUI / NSF; S. Dagnello.

This cluster began to form when the universe was less than 1.5 billion years old. The individual galaxies in this cluster will eventually coalesce into one giant galaxy, the most massive in the universe. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, Chapman said. Further observations showed that the overall structure contains about 50 satellite galaxies, which will be absorbed by the central galaxy in the future. The previous record holder, known as the El Gordo Cluster, has a mass of 3 quadrillion suns, but SPT2349 likely outweighs that by at least four to five times.

That such a huge object could have formed when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old surprised astronomers, as computer models suggested it would take much longer for such large objects to form.

Given that humans have only explored a small portion of the sky, it is likely that even more massive objects could lurk far out in the universe.

Astronomers have the concept of "the largest object in the universe." This status is periodically assigned to one or another object, but their very presence is already a sensation. What kind of "giants" are we talking about and where are they located? And which one is really "the best"? Here are the results of some of the latest astronomical discoveries.

Scientists figured out the age of the universe

SuperVoid

This largest cold spot in the universe is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. The spot is 1.8 billion light years long. Although "void" means "emptiness" in English, this name for this region of space is not entirely fair. It's just that there are about 30 percent fewer galaxy clusters here than in the space surrounding them.

Cold spots are filled with cosmic relic microwave radiation. But so far, scientists are not entirely clear how they arise. One version says that these are traces of black holes of parallel universes. But another hypothesis claims that this is the result of the passage of protons through voids: passing through empty space, particles lose their energy ... True, it is possible that there is no connection at all between cold spots and voids.

superblob

In 2006, the title of the largest object in the universe was awarded to the cosmic "bubble" (blob) with a length of 200 million light years, which is a giant accumulation of gas, dust and galaxies. Curiously, the galaxies in this jellyfish-shaped cluster are four times denser than usual in the universe.

Clusters of galaxies and gas balls inside a giant bubble are called Liman-Alpha bubbles. According to scientists, they formed about 2 billion years after the Big Bang.

As for the superblob itself, it probably formed when massive stars that existed at the dawn of space went supernova, releasing a gigantic amount of gas in the process.

Perhaps the superblob is one of the most ancient space objects. It accumulates so much gas that over time more and more galaxies will form from it.

Great Wall CfA2

It was discovered by American astrophysicist Margaret Joan Geller and John Peter Huchra while studying the redshift effect for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. CfA2 is 500 million light years long and 16 million light years wide. The name "Great Wall" is given to this space region, as it resembles the Great Wall of China in shape.

It is possible that the extent of CfA2 may be even greater - 750 million light years. But the exact parameters cannot yet be named, since the "wall" is partially located in the "zone of avoidance" - it is covered with dense accumulations of gas and dust, which contributes to the distortion of optical wavelengths.

Great Wall of Sloan

It was discovered in 2003 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, which involves the scientific mapping of galaxies in order to determine the presence of the largest objects in the universe. This object consists of several superclusters, the total length of which is 1.4 billion light years.

Although, according to the cosmological principle, objects larger than 1.2 billion light-years cannot exist in the Universe, the presence of the Great Wall of Sloan completely refutes this theory.

By the way, some of the clusters that make up the Great Wall of Sloan have very interesting characteristics. So, one of them has a core of galaxies, from the side looking like a giant antennae. Inside the other, a process of close interaction and merging of galaxies takes place.

Giant gamma ring

The giant galactic gamma-ray ring (Giant GRB Ring) is currently considered the second largest object in the universe. Its length is 5 billion light years.

The object was found like this. While studying bursts of gamma-rays produced by the death of massive stars, astronomers noticed a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were located at the same distance from the Earth. They formed a ring in the sky, which is 70 times the diameter of the full moon.

It was hypothesized that the gamma ring may be a projection of a certain sphere around which all bursts of gamma radiation occurred in a relatively short period of time - about 250 million years.

But what could create such a sphere? One theory says that galaxies cluster around regions with a high concentration of dark matter. But in fact, the exact reason for the formation of such structures remains unknown.

El Gordo means "fat man" in Spanish. This is how astronomers named the largest and hottest known cluster of galaxies in our universe. The El Gordo cluster is located 9.7 billion light-years from Earth. It consists of two separate smaller clusters colliding at speeds of several million kilometers per hour.

Pulsar J1311-3430 or "Black Widow" weighs as much as two suns, but it is no more than the width of the state of Washington. Every day, this super-dense neutron star is getting bigger, "eating" a nearby companion star. In 93 minutes, the pulsar makes a complete revolution around its victim, bringing down streams of radiation on it and taking away its energy. This process has one outcome: one day the victim will finally disappear.

A year on the asteroid (3753) Cruitney lasts about the same as on Earth - 364 days. This means that this celestial body rotates at almost the same distance from the Sun as our planet. Our orbital twin was discovered in 1986. However, there is no threat of a collision: Cruitney will not come closer to Earth than 12 million kilometers.

Rejected by its "parent" star, the lone planet CFBDSIR2149 wanders the universe at a distance of 100 light-years from us. Most likely, this wanderer was thrown out of her solar system during the turbulent years of its formation, when the orbits of other planets were determined.

The Smith Cloud is a giant collection of hydrogen gas that is millions of times heavier than the Sun. Its length is 11 thousand light years, and its width is 2.5 thousand years. The shape of the cloud resembles a torpedo, and in fact it is the same: the cloud rushes towards our galaxy and crashes into the Milky Way in about 27 million years.

At 300 thousand light-years from the center of the Milky Way is a satellite galaxy, which is almost entirely composed of dark matter and gas. Scientists discovered evidence of its existence in 2009. And only a few months ago, astronomers managed to find four 100-million-year-old stars in this cluster of dark matter.

The blue hue of Marble Planet HD 189733b is associated with the oceans. In fact, this is a gas giant, rotating in an orbit close to the star. There has never been water. The temperature exceeds 927 degrees Celsius. And the “sky blue” is created by rain from molten glass.

When our universe was only about 875 million years old, a black hole with a mass of 12 billion suns formed in space. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (pictured above) is only 4 million times as massive as the sun. Supermassive J0100+2802 lies at the center of a galaxy 12.8 billion light-years away. Now scientists are puzzling over the question: how did she manage to reach such sizes in such a short period of time?

The star R136a1 is 256 times heavier than the Sun and 7.4 million times brighter than it. Scientists believe that colossi of this size may appear as a result of the merger of many smaller stars. The lifespan of a fiery chimera is only a few million years, after which its components burn out.

The Boomerang Nebula, located 5,000 light-years from Earth, is the coldest place in the universe. The temperature inside the cloud of gas and dust reaches -272 degrees below zero. The cloud is expanding at a speed of about 590 thousand kilometers per hour. The gas of the nebula is cooled by rapid expansion in the same way as the refrigerant in refrigerators.

Our rating includes the largest, coldest, hottest, oldest, deadliest, lonely, dark, brightest - and other "very-most" objects that man has managed to detect in space. Some are literally within reach, while others are on the edge of the universe known to us.

December 17, 2018

The size of the universe is unknown. It only stirs our thoughts. But in the night sky there are plenty of objects that will surprise you with their scale. Let's take a closer look at them.

1. Supervoid (size - 1.8 billion light years)

With the help of the WMAP and Planck apparatuses, we were able to examine the cosmic microwave background radiation in great detail. The essence of the study is to understand the state of the world in the first moments of its "transparency".

After the Big Bang for 380 thousand years. The cosmos did not emit light. The temperature and density of matter were so strong that radiation could not penetrate through them.

And only at the moment when the radiation received space for propagation, it became possible to at least “see” something. CMB radiation is the remnant of this event. Everyone can see it on an old TV on an "empty" channel where there are ripples. A large percentage of these ripples are relic background.

With the help of the above satellites, it became possible to see the early picture of the Universe, in particular, its temperature fluctuations. It turned out that they are insignificant and can be attributed to the error and random fluctuations. Despite this, the CMB map is fraught with a lot of information.

With its help, astrophysicists were able to discover the coldest part of the Cosmos. It was called the supervoid (supervoid). From our point of view, this is not absolutely nothing - there are many objects here. However, their number is one third less than in the surrounding area.

The reasons for the formation of such a huge spot are not yet intelligible.

2. Shapley Supercluster (8000 galaxies)

The total mass of this cluster of galaxies is more than 10 million billion solar masses. It is located in the constellation Centaurus.

For a long time, the object was out of sight, as it was hidden by the Milky Way. With the help of X-ray telescopes, it was possible to see an attractor that attracts our and neighboring galaxies.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it was discovered by the American astronomer H. Shapley, after whom he received the name. Its attraction is so strong that our entire galaxy is attracted to it at a speed of 2.2 million km. at one o'clock.

3. Laniakea (size - 520 million light years)

It has long been determined that objects in space do not stand still: some scatter from each other, while others, on the contrary, approach each other. Despite the enormous speed of these processes, we practically do not feel this visually, since cosmic distances are even greater.

The whole process will take several billion years.

4. Gamma ring (length - 5 billion light years)

The rays from this gamma source extend to 5 billion sv. years. With the help of instruments, 9 consecutive gamma-ray bursts of colossal force were recorded in a small area of ​​the sky. If we could see this process with the naked eye, we could see a red ring larger than the moon in the sky.

The reason for this formation is not yet clear. There is an assumption that a group of galaxies could give rise to it. Quasars in these structures at short intervals emitted huge jets of gamma rays, which were able to capture.

5. The Great Wall in Hercules and the Northern Crown (size - 10 billion light years)

If you explore the space in the constellations of the Northern Crown and Hercules, you will find an increased amount of gamma radiation.

Since these events occur frequently in this location, it seems that there is some large object that is associated with them. According to estimates, its size can be up to 10 billion light years. It must be a cluster of galaxies and dark matter on a colossal scale.

As it turned out later, the size of the object covers not only these two constellations. But once the name stuck (thanks to a teenager who wrote about the object on Wikipedia), it was left.

As you can see, the Cosmos is filled with rather strange formations. Some of them call into question the established hypotheses of the formation of the Universe. On the other hand, it allows looking for answers to new questions in modern science.

I think everyone knows that stars don't fall - they're just meteors that burn up as they enter the atmosphere. But what many do not know is that real shooting stars also exist, and they are called moving. They are large balls of hot gas rushing through space at millions of kilometers per hour.

When a binary system of stars is swallowed up by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, one of the two partners is swallowed up and the other is expelled at high speed. Imagine how a huge ball of gas, four times the size of our Sun, rushes at great speed!

hell planet

Gliese 581 - just "infernal hell". Really. The planet with all its nature seeks to kill you. But despite this, scientists have determined that this hell may be the most likely candidate for future colonization. The planet revolves around a red dwarf, many times smaller than our Sun, whose luminosity is only 1.3% of our star. The planet is much closer to its star than we are to ours. Because of this, it is in a tide-locked state, with one side of the planet always facing the star, while the other faces out into space. Like our moon.

The tidal lock resulted in interesting features. If you go out on the side of the planet facing the Sun, you will surely melt like a snowman. On the other side of the planet, you will definitely freeze instantly. However, it is theoretically possible to live in the "twilight zone" between the two extremes.

Life on Gliese 581, if there is one, has its challenges. The planet orbits a red dwarf, which means the presence of a red sky above the planet, due to the lower frequencies of the visible spectrum. A real hell. The photosynthetic elements will have to get used to the constant bombardment of infrared radiation, which will turn them deep black. No salad would look appetizing on such a planet.

Castor system

If one or even two suns is not enough for you, look at the Castor system. As one of two bright dots in the constellation Gemini in our night sky, this system is still brighter than its partner. The fact is that the Castor system is not one, not two, but all six stars revolving around a common center of mass. Three binary systems of stars revolve one around the other - two hot and bright A-type stars and four M-type red dwarfs. Together, these six stars put out 52.4 times the luminosity of our Sun.

Space Raspberry and Space Rum

For the past few years, scientists have been studying the cloud of dust at the center of our Milky Way. This dust cloud called Sagittarius B2 smells like rum and tastes like raspberries! The cloud of gas is composed mostly of ethyl formate, which gives raspberries their flavor and rum its distinctive smell. The giant cloud contains billions, billions, and more billions of this substance (and it would be wonderful if it were not saturated with particles of propyl cyanide). The creation and distribution of these complex molecules remains a mystery to scientists, so the intergalactic restaurant will remain closed for now.

Burning Ice Planet

Remember Gliese? This "hell" that we visited earlier? Let's return to the same solar system. As if one killer planet wasn't enough. Gliese supports a planet made almost entirely of ice - with a temperature of 439 degrees Celsius. The only reason this ice remains solid is the gigantic amount of water present on the planet. Gravity pulls it all toward the core, squeezing the water molecules so tightly that they can't evaporate.

diamond planet

This planet will decorate the neck of any girl, and maybe even some Bill Gates. 55 Cancri E - made entirely of crystalline diamond - would cost $26.9 nonillion. Probably even the Sultan of Brunei dreams of one at night.

The giant diamond planet was once part of a binary star system until its partner began to devour it. However, the star could not take its carbon core with it, and the carbon simply turned into diamond under the influence of high temperature and gigantic pressure - with a surface temperature of 1648 degrees Celsius, conditions were almost ideal.

A third of the planet's mass is pure diamond. While the Earth is covered in water and abundant in oxygen, this planet is made up of graphite, diamond, and a few silicates. The huge gem is twice the size of Earth and eight times as heavy, classifying it as a "super-Earth".

Cloud Himiko

If somewhere there is an object that can show us the origins of the primordial galaxy, then this is it. The Himiko Cloud is the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe and dates back only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The Himiko cloud amazes scientists with its gigantic size (only half the size of the Milky Way).

Himiko belongs to the so-called epoch of reionization, or the period from 200 million to one billion years after the Big Bang - and this is the first glimpse of the early formation of galaxies that scientists have been able to observe. Previously, it was assumed that the Himiko cloud could be one large galaxy with a mass of about 40 billion from the solar one, however, according to the latest data, three galaxies can be located in the Himiko cloud at once, and relatively young ones.

The largest water reservoir in the universe

Twelve billion light-years away, at the heart of a quasar, lies the largest reservoir of water in the universe. It contains about 140 trillion times more water than Earth's oceans. The water, unfortunately, takes the form of a massive gas cloud several hundred light-years across. It is located next to a colossal black hole at the heart of a quasar, and the hole, in turn, is two hundred billion times the size of our Sun and at the same time constantly spewing energy equivalent to what 1000 trillion Suns would produce! This is to give you an idea of ​​the scale of the local brew.

The strongest electric current in the universe

Just a couple of years ago, scientists stumbled upon an electric current on a cosmic scale: 10^18 amperes, or about one trillion lightning bolts. Lightning is believed to originate in a huge black hole at the center of the galaxy, at the core of which there is supposedly a "powerful cosmic jet". Apparently, the black hole's powerful magnetic field allows it to launch these lightning bolts through dust and gas over 150,000 light-years away. And if you think that our galaxy is large - one such lightning is one and a half times its size.