I can see that over the last several weeks, I have been slowly leaning towards lots of big questions. This is one of my personal conceits (i.e. I like lots of the philosophy 101 questions about ethics and values…).
So, with big questions circling my head, I considered looming into similarly big things…the top of my own list can be seen in the diagram below…
The Sloan Great Wall is arguably the definition of big (being made of superclusters, which in turn are made up of galaxies, which in turn are made of stars and nebulae, in turn…after several more succeeding frames of reference come …us.).
Maybe it is just the dorky 10 year old part of me, but I think that objects like this should be in the daily lexicon (and sadly enough for my friends, it will be…).
Examining the Great Wall
http://www.universetoday.com/85530/examining-the-great-wall
Structure exists on nearly all scales in the universe. Matter clumps under its own gravity into planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, and superclusters. Beyond even these in scale are the filaments and voids. The largest of these filaments is known as the Sloan Great Wall. This giant string of galaxies is 1.4 billion light years across making it the largest known structure in the universe. Yet surprisingly, the Great Wall has never been studied in detail. Superclusters within it have been examined, but the wall as a whole has only come into consideration in a paper from a team led by astronomers at Tartu Observatory in Estonia.
Superclusters
http://universe-review.ca/F03-supercluster.htm
The Universe within 1 billion Light Years the Neighboring Superclusters
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc.html
Our Local Supercluster
http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/cosmic/local_supercluster_info.html
The Local Supercluster is actually centered on the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, which is why the Local Supercluster is sometimes called the Virgo Supercluster. Its equatorial plane is almost perpendicular to our Galactic plane. Our Supercluster, with a diameter measuring roughly 100 million light years or so, has a collective mass of about 1015 times the mass of the Sun.
