A galaxy is unfathomably huge, as it usually contains hundreds of billions of stars. But since the Universe is much bigger, so big that nobody knows for sure where its boundaries are, there’s no telling if it could be a limit in size.
The filaments that make up the so-called ‘cosmic web’ are baffling the minds of scientists. These filaments are practically a network that binds the Universe’s galaxies together.
Cosmic filaments are rotating… but why?
Research published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals something totally unexpected: some of the cosmic filaments are spinning around their axis like drills. Why are those structures spinning and what kind of force could possibly be the culprit are total mysteries.
Study coauthor Noam Libeskind, who is also a cosmologist for Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, declared for Space.com:
[Cosmic filaments] are structures so vast that entire galaxies are just specks of dust,
These huge filaments are much, much bigger than clusters.
Previously, scientists believed that galaxy clusters were the biggest objects from the Universe, but as it always happens, astronomy is there to contradict them.
If some of the most popular theories in astrophysics will ever turn out to be true, we’ll have to think about what could possibly be the biggest structure in the Multiverse. Our Universe could be just one of many other universes, and what could exist beyond them is another major conundrum.
In general, galaxy clusters have total masses of 1014 — 1015 solar masses. These huge structures usually have a diameter that ranges from 1 to 5 Mpc.
By comparison, the Universe itself is a lot bigger than galaxy clusters. The estimations of scientists indicate that the observable Universe’s diameter is about 93 billion light-years.