In short, here’s what’s going on: an international team of scientists have come across the largest structure in the universe; it would take 4 billion years to get across. It’s a large quasar group — supermassive black holes that form one massive structure..Consisting of seventy-three quasars, it is over four billion light-years across at its widest point. That’s 1,600 times larger than the distance between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.
As Dr Clowes (one of the researchers on the team) explains:
“While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this large quasar group, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe. This is hugely exciting – not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.
“Even traveling at the speed of light, it would take 4 billion years to cross. This is significant not just because of its size but also because it challenges the Cosmological Principle.”
Einstien’s Cosmological Theory states that “‘viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers”, could be under threat as one of the principle rules of astronomy.
Via: Royal Astronomical Society