Astronomers identify largest structure in the universe

An international team of astronomers has discovered the largest known structure in the universe which is about 4 billion light-years in dimension across, compared to 120,000 light years for 'Milky Way,' the galaxy to which our earth belongs to.

The large quasar group is so large it would take a spacecraft travelling at the speed of light some 4 billion years to cross it.

The team led by Dr Roger Clowes of Britain's University of Central Lancashire, has found a large quasar group (LQG), which is so large that it would take a spaceship travelling at the speed of light some 4 billion years to cross it, the Royal Astronomical Society said in a release. The report on the findings is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The LQGs are the nuclei of galaxies from the early days of the universe that undergo 'brief' periods of extremely high brightness that make them visible across billions of light-years away. The 'brief' in astrophysics mean 10-100 million years.

The discovered structure is so large that it challenges Albert Einstein's cosmological principle, which assumes that the universe, when viewed at a sufficiently large scale, looks the same irrespective of wherever you are observing it from.

"While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe,'' Clowes said.

''This is hugely exciting – not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe,'' he continued.