According to the Big Bang, the Universe should be the same everywhere. On the largest scales,
it shouldn't matter in which direction you look. This is because it is thought that the Big Bang
occurred everywhere, at the same time. This means that all locations had the same temperature and
densities. Only tiny imperfections could get superimposed on this uniformity. These
imperfections could then evolve due to gravity. Large scale structures formed out of these
imperfections. These included stars, galaxies, and the filaments they formed on - the cosmic
web. These were all predicted and eventually observed but the latter would require Dark Matter.
As the Big Bang had a fixed start date it meant that there was a limit to how large the largest
structure could be beyond this we would expect to see a return to uniformity as the random
fluctuations fade away. This limit was called the End of Greatness but more recent observations
break this limit on an almost unimaginable scale. Let's dive in and find out more...
Back in 1981 Robert Kirschner, Augustus Oemler, Paul Schechter, and Stephen Schectman
discovered a million cubic megaparsec void in space in the direction of Bootes. This
was the first confirmation that early fluctuations in the density of matter
would leave visible finger prints on the observable matter. A different paper by Jaan
Ernasto and colleagues looked at the redshift data from clusters of galaxies and found that straight
chains of clusters of galaxies were seen. The mapping showed many empty spaces in the Universe
with seemingly higher concentrations of galaxies forming walls to the voids. On
average these voids were about 490 Million light-years by 490 MLY by 24 MLYs in volumes.
When they analysed the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex they discovered a filament structure.
Slowly a picture started to appear which revealed that most of the matter in the universe was being
clumped into a filament network with large voids in between. The problem was that our
theory of gravity cannot account for the extent of clumping without invoking just the right amount of
the mysterious substance they called Dark Matter. Originally introduced to explain anomalous galaxy
dynamics and now employed to explain how the small fluctuations were sustained long enough to
allow large scale structures to form. These early fluctuations would place a limit on the maximum
size of these large scale structures. Beyond this, we should see these random fluctuations disappear
and the universe should take on a more homogenous appearance. This limit they
elegantly called the End of Greatness and its limit was set at about 1,200 MLy.
There are many structures that you might already be familiar with that come close to this limit
so let's examine these so that you can start to understand the scale we are talking about.
The Virgo Supercluster is our nearest supercluster and is thought to span
an area of around 110 million Light Years.
The Shapley Supercluster was first identified by Harlow Shapley in 1930 as a cloud of galaxies.
It was not officially identified as a structure until 1989.
It spans an impressive 400 Million Light Years.
Both the Virgo Super Cluster and our local neighbourhood are part of a structure
called the Laniakea Supercluster and was identified in 2014.
It spans an estimated 520 Million Light Years across.
The Coma Wall or Great Wall was first identified in 1989 and is an immense
galaxy filament. It is thought to span anywhere between 500 and 750 Million light years across.
The Perseus-Pisces Supercluster which is part of the Perseus-Pegasus Filament which itself
stretches for roughly a billion light years. The main cluster in this group are Abell 262,
Abell 347, and Abell 426. This group was originally discovered in 1985.
In 2016 the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
discovered a supercluster complex that is now called the BOSS Great Wall.
It consists of two elongated superclusters and several smaller superclusters. The supercluster
is roughly 1 billion light years in diameter and consists of at least 830 visible galaxies.
These are all just under the theoretical limit so let's go LARGE.
The South Pole Wall was discovered very recently and is thought to be a giant
wall of galaxies that extend across at least 1.37 billion light years of space
Slightly larger than this is the Sloan Great Wall.
Once more a gigantic galaxy filament discovered back in 2003. It too measures about 1.37 billion
light year across and this is about 1/60 of the diameter of the observable universe.
The Clowes-Campusano LQG is a grouping of 34 quasars
originally discovered back in 1991 and spans a staggering
2 billion light year across and is thought to be located about 9.5 Billion Light years away
Adjacent to this lies an even larger group called the U1.11 and contains 38 quasars
located 8.8 Billion light years away. It spans an impressive 2.2 billion light-years.
The Giant Arc was discovered in June 2021.
It consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, as well as gas and dust.
It is thought to be located 9.2 Billion light years away and spans 3.3 billion light years
The Huge-LQG is a collection of 73 quasars and is the largest known quasar group and spans
a mighty 4 billion lights across and is thought to be about 9 billion light years away from Earth.
The Giant GRB Ring was first discovered in 2015 through gamma-ray burst mapping. It consists of a
ring of 9 gamma-ray bursts that may be associated with one of the largest known cosmic structures.
Typically gamma ray bursts do not occur close to each other. So finding 9 so close together
was very significant and might indicate the existence of a giant supergalactic structure
which stretches over 5.6 Billion Light years across.
But the largest of all the structures if the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.
This too was discovered through gamma-ray burst mapping. This cluster consists
of around 19 Gamma Ray Burst making it a staggering 10 billion light years in length.
So how is it possible to have these large structures form in the Universe and still
think that the Big Bang Happened? These do present a rather large problem for astronomers
and some would rather that these structures simply go away.
Some even suggest that the in quotes signals may emerge from underlying random noise. Suggesting
that statistics is incorrectly discovering non-existent patterns. This would conveniently
get them back to the random noise that they had been expecting at the ever increasing scale.
But partly I think they may actually be correct here but in a totally different way.
Their assumption on all these distances is based solely on the red-shift. The more red-shifted it
is the further away it must be. Halton Arp spent his whole career examining these distant galaxies
and saw a pattern that seemed to indicate that that higher red-shift objects tended to be
associated with less red-shifted larger galaxies, often across one of the two axis of this parent
galaxy. I have an extensive series covering a lot of his evidence in more detail which I will link
in the description below. Through many examples, he was able to show that it appeared as if the
galaxies were ejecting highly energised material which formed into quasars which were highly
redshifted. A pattern he was able to show was that as these quasars got further away from the parent
galaxy their red-shift decreased and eventually they seemed to turn into dwarf galaxies.
The most important aspect was that he found that this redshift didn't change slowly but
went in clear jumps. These jumps were offsets from the parent galaxies but clearly quantised.
So where astronomers saw quasars sat millions if not billions of light years behind these
galaxies they might in fact be much closer. If galaxies can create new galaxies through
the creation of quasars which in turn form other galaxies and all these red-shifts were quantised
it would mean if we only used red-shift for distance then we would see galaxies
forming into giant walls. This is exactly what astronomers are finding but these giant structures
may not exist at all and may not be caused by random patterns in the data but instead be a
misinterpretation of the quantised red-shift data making it appear like structures. In some sense,
it is like looking at a rainbow and believing that the rainbow is a real structure