Astronomers discover huge quasar group
Source: Agencies |
January 13, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
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ASTRONOMERS have discovered the largest known structure in the universe - a group of quasars so large it would take 4 billion years to cross it while traveling at speed of light.
The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein's Cosmological Principle, the assumption the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.
The findings by academics from Britain's University of Central Lancashire were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Quasars are believed to be the brightest objects in the universe, with light emanating from the nuclei of galaxies visible billions of light-years away.
"Since 1982 it has been known that quasars tend to group together in clumps or 'structures' of surprisingly large sizes," the society said.
This newly discovered large quasar group has a dimension of 500 megaparsecs, each megaparsec measuring 3.3 million light-years. Its longest dimension is 1,200 megaparsecs, or 4 billion light-years, the society said. That is 1,600 times larger than the distance from Earth's Milky Way to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda.
The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein's Cosmological Principle, the assumption the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.
The findings by academics from Britain's University of Central Lancashire were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Quasars are believed to be the brightest objects in the universe, with light emanating from the nuclei of galaxies visible billions of light-years away.
"Since 1982 it has been known that quasars tend to group together in clumps or 'structures' of surprisingly large sizes," the society said.
This newly discovered large quasar group has a dimension of 500 megaparsecs, each megaparsec measuring 3.3 million light-years. Its longest dimension is 1,200 megaparsecs, or 4 billion light-years, the society said. That is 1,600 times larger than the distance from Earth's Milky Way to the nearest galaxy, the Andromeda.
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