The Largest Structure in the Universe

It has always been a source of amazement to me, astronomy and the study of objects in and beyond our Solar System. I dont pretend to understand much of it, I wish I could but I was always a 'C' student in astronomy; not good enough at the math is what my T.A. told me. Fair enough, I still love looking over Hubble photographs and try to keep up on the Mars missions. I also feel humbled by the size and scope of various objects in our galaxy and beyond; I am speaking of the various nebulas, dwarf stars, distant spiral galaxies, the shadows of planets orbiting distant stars. It is a great time to be alive as we are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we know about our Universe, its origins, its makeup.

What brought all this up was the release, Saturday, of the news that the largest structure in the known universe has been discovered, and well....enormous doesnt even begin to describe it.

From the article:

"The newfound LQC is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point. To put that mind-boggling size into perspective, the disk of the Milky Way galaxy — home of Earth's solar system — is about 100,000 light-years wide. And the Milky Way is separated from its nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, by about 2.5 million light-years."

To use a somewhat hackneyed phrase, this just blows my mind. So our own galaxy, filled as it is, with nebulas that  span light years, solar systems, stars....would only take up about 1% of this structure, if that. Contemplating these massive objects, these gigantic distances, helps me keep my life in perspective. Not that it makes me feel insignificant, but more that it reminds me that we are made up of the dust of stars, of stars that exploded billions of years ago and the forces of gravity caused the dust and particles of these distant explosions to coalesce into our sun and the planetary bodies that orbit it. Somehow it doesnt really matter how large this newly discovered structure is, how long the time it takes for light to travel from point A to B across a galaxy, or galaxies, none of this will have much impact upon my daily life; but it sure reminds me that there is so much out there we still do not understand, and it is the natural curiosity of humans that got us to this point. It is our innate desire to understand the world, and cosmos, and our place in it, that pushes us to explore our world and other worlds, and the surrounding universe. This is the way it should be, because when we don't explore, when we don't push our knowledge boundaries, we stagnate. We are unique, each of us, on this planet, and in the Universe and we should never forget that. 

One more point: I love that thru the advances of science we are able to peer into the farthest reaches of the Universe, which means at the same time we are looking back in time, and we are almost able to see our point of origin, we are almost able to see the Big Bang itself. 

-daniel