After you eat a family-sized bag of chips or an entire footlong from Subway you may
feel pretty big but I'm here to tell you thankfully you're nowhere near the size of
some of the largest objects in our universe but if you're not what is before I roll the
intro I just wanted to let you guys know that this video is part of a collab with zap physics
after you find out about the largest object in our universe make sure to jump over to his
channel and check out the smallest be sure to let us know what you think of the video down in
the comment section below the analytics really helped us smaller channels and let's jump in
mankind has built some truly impressive things the Empire State Building the Sydney Opera House
the Three Gorges Dam my faith that maybe the next Fast and Furious movie won't suck all true marvels
of engineering and willpower but even these massive feats pale in comparison to what the
natural world can put together mankind's tallest building the Burj Kalifa tops out at just over
2,700 feet where you could sack two and a half of them within the Grand Canyon and mankind's
largest building is Boeing's Everett factory the production site for the Boeing 747 family the
building basically one enormous hangar has over 13 million cubic meters of space bigger than 5000
Olympic swimming pools seven MetLife Stadium and the surprisingly spacious Ford Fiesta but
even this colossal factory wouldn't even fill up a tenth of the Chicxulub asteroid crater that helped
wipe out the dinosaurs but why limit ourselves to the only rock we've called home the solar
system is home to some pretty impressive feats the tallest point you could stand on earth would
be atop Mount Everest and nearly five and a half miles above our surface you need several layers
and oxygen tanks just to survive a few minutes but on Mars thanks to a lack of tectonic plates
and no Multan planet core Olympus Mons pops out 16 miles above the surface of the Red Planet and
covers an area nearly the size of France making it the biggest mountain in our solar system now
getting even bigger if I asked you what you saw the largest object in our solar system was you'd
probably say the Sun go ahead I'll give you a few seconds to try to think of something massive
if you stuck with the Sun we couldn't really blame you after all it's what those posters on
the walls of our fifth grade classrooms taught us to believe and it's certainly a better guest
than Pluto the largest thing in our solar system isn't the Sun but something that comes from an
coronal mass ejections or a release of plasma from the surface of the Sun and they can reach crazy
sizes they expand as they propagate away from the Sun and can grow to nearly a quarter of the space
between Earth and the Sun in what would become known as the Carrington event in 1859 a coronal
ejection caused by a solar storm reached more than 94 million miles heating earth and causing
the largest geomagnetic storm on record let's just say things got pretty wild well as wild
as the 1850s could get all over the northern hemisphere colorful Aurora's danced across the
night skies reaching as far south as Mexico that night telegraphed communications around
the world began to fail there were reports of sparks showering from Telegraph machines
shocking operators and sending papers ablaze and some telegraph operators could continue to send
messages even after disconnecting their power supplies according to the Lloyd's of London if
a similar solar storm hit the planet today it would cause more than 2 trillion in damage to
the US electrical grid but move beyond our solar system and now we're really talking through the
biggest of the big at the center of our galaxy sits the supermassive black hole Sagittarius a
at 4.1 million solar masses or 4.1 million times larger than our Sun it's the most massive object
in our galaxy but as far as black holes go ours is near the runt of the litter 53 million miles away
lies the Chad of all black holes the supermassive black hole at the center of the Mesa 87 galaxies
it's 6.4 billion times the mass of our Sun and would stretch across our entire solar system by
the way this was that famous black hole that was photographed last year but the biggest of
the big is yet to come at approximately 10 billion light years across its longest length the Hercules
Corona borealis great wall also as the great GRP wall searches across 10% of the observable
universe for comparison our Milky Way galaxy only spans some hundred thousand light-years
discovered in 2013 the great derby wall is a massive superstructure of gas dust and dark
matter containing billions of galaxies and more than twice the size of the previous largest known
object the huge large quasar group now you may be wondering if this great wall contains billions of
galaxies why does it count as one big thing and not a bunch of smaller with still massive things
by that logic couldn't you just arbitrarily add more and more galaxies together to get an even
bigger object well you're not wrong but what makes the great Jerry wall unique is that this
super cluster is home to group of tightly packed gamma-ray burst sources in much higher abundance
than we see in the normal background of space and it's separated spatially from everything around it
gamma rays are the most powerful type of radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum this super high
frequency radiation is emanated only in a handful of stellar events like supernova collisions of
neutron stars or by especially fast spinning black holes the structure is even so large it seems to
contradict our theories about the evolution of the universe the structure is 10 billion light
years away which means that we're seeing would it look like ten billion years in the past and since
the universe is 13.8 billion years old give or take this means that this massive structure had
to form in the first four billion years of the universe and our modern understanding of physics
can't explain how such a massive structure formed in such a small amount of time even istván Horvath
the man who discovered the great gob wall says he has no idea and the structure could have formed
in that amount of time so why exactly does this great GRB wall not seem to fit into our theories
I'm here from zap physics to try to explain a little bit more about this question it all
comes down to what's known as the cosmological principle the basic idea of the cosmological
principle is that the universe should look the same no matter where you are or which direction
you look now I know what you're thinking this can't be true since we see different stars plane
it's and galaxies all around us the caveat to the cosmological principle is that it is only
expected to be true above some very large length scale this is due to the fact that we expect the
universe to have been very small right after the Big Bang during this time quantum fluctuations
created tiny spots of non uniformity then the universe went through a period of rapid
inflation stretching these small fluctuations into the galaxies and clusters we see today
however if the cosmological principle is correct these fluctuations and thus the corresponding
large-scale structures shouldn't be too large the great GRB wall is about ten times the most well
accepted theoretical predictions and so it seems to contradict the cosmological principle but this
isn't the end of the story quantum mechanics is inherently probabilistic meaning that there
would be some chance that a larger than expected fluctuation that would result in something like
the great GRB wall could occur however this likelihood goes down the larger the object is
and the more of them there are so whether or not the great GRB wall is actually compatible with
the cosmological principle and the theories of inflation still remains an open question for now
the largest structure in the universe may just be its greatest mystery like I said at the start this
video was done in collaboration with ZAF physics the channel about you guessed it physics it's a
great channel and this is my first clap so I'd highly recommend checking out his video here on
the smallest object in the universe have a great day and remember there is always more to learn