One Of The Largest Structures In The Universe

Posted on Friday, 21 July, 2017Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

One Of The Largest Structures In The Universe.

The Saraswati Supercluster is an extremely massive galaxy supercluster discovered in the Stripe 82 region of SDSS that falls in the direction of the Pisces constellation. Named after both, a Hindu goddess and an ancient river. The Saraswati supercluster is a major concentration of galaxies and galaxy clusters, forming a galaxy wall like structure, and spanning at least 600 million light years (200 Mpc) across that includes at least 43 massive galaxy clusters. It stands at a distance of 4,000 million light years away from Earth. The Saraswati supercluster was discovered prior to February 2016 by a team of astrophysicists from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, both in Pune, India. The Saraswati Supercluster is one of the largest and most massive superclusters known, comparable to the most massive Shapley Concentration in the nearby universe. The supercluster is surrounded by a network of galaxy filaments, clusters and large diameter voids. This supercluster was observed as it was when the Universe was 10 billion years old. The spherical collapse model suggests that the central region of the Saraswati supercluster may be collapsing. The supercluster and its environs reveal that some extreme large-scale, prominent matter density enhancements had formed in the past when dark energy had just started to dominate structure formation. This galactic concentration thus sheds light on the role of dark energy and cosmological initial conditions in supercluster formation.