A research team discovers a giant cosmic fossil in the universe

The research team was the first to fully map the spherical superstructure. It’s practically on our doorstep.

Manoa – The Big Bang occurred and created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago. From a human perspective, that was an almost unimaginable long ago. The research team’s discovery is almost ancient. The globular formation, a collection of increasingly dense galaxies, that the team discovered, formed just 400,000 years after the Big Bang. This makes it a true fossil and perhaps a unique find.

The research team believes “this may be the first time astronomers have identified a single structure associated with the BAO,” according to an article on website University of Hawaii. The abbreviation BAO stands for Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation and describes the wave-like propagation of plasma shortly after the Big Bang. These density waves “petrified”, so to speak, when the relationship between matter and radiation broke down.

Cosmic Fossil: Research team has discovered superstructure from the time of the Big Bang

Although the formation, which the researchers named “Ho’oleilana,” had already been mentioned in a 2016 paper, this did not reveal the full extent of the structure or identify it as a BAO. This may be due in part to the enormous size of Ho’oleilana.

The giant superstructure “Ho’oleilana” is a billion light-years across

Even with data from Cosmicflows-4, the largest compilation of precise galaxy distances to date according to the university’s website, Ho’oleilana “is so large that it extends to the edge of the strip of sky we study,” astronomer Brent explains. took over . The density ball is a giant billion light-years in size.

This means that it dwarfs other giant structures that have already been discovered. For example, the 1.4 billion light-year-wide Boötes supercluster lies within Ho’oleilana. “It has been a fascinating process to create this map and learn how the structure of the giant crust of Holliana is composed of elements that have been identified in the past as some of the largest structures in the universe,” said Daniel Bomaredi of Harvard University. CEA Paris-Saclay, team cartographer.

The research team has identified the cosmic fossil “Ho’oleilana” in our immediate vicinity

All of this makes it even more surprising that this massive structure exists practically in our cosmic neighborhood. “Ho’oleilana” lies on the border of the Laniakea supercluster, which also includes our home, the Milky Way, among other things, says the scientific journal. com.scinexx mentioned.

The newly discovered BAO also allows conclusions to be drawn about the speed at which the universe is expanding. The study, published by the research team in the journal, says: “The remnants of these waves form a ruler that can be observed over time in the evolving universe, and provides evidence of the physics that governs cosmic evolution.” Astrophysical Journal published.

We do not know what happened before the universe was created. However, one Nobel laureate believes that another world once existed. (sp)

Category list image: © Frédéric Durillon, Animea Studio; Daniel Pommarid, IRFU, CEA Paris-Saclay University. This work benefited from government funding from France 2030 (P2I – Graduate School of Physics) under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0003.