'This is a very big deal.' 🌌 engineering
The 'Giant Arc' of touching galaxies would span twenty times the moon's width in the night sky
The"Giant Arc", as Lopez and her colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England call it, was observed via the studying of light from roughly 40,000 quasars, during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are thought to be nightmare-provokingly large supermassive black holes actively feeding at the center of a galaxy. And this massive feeding frenzy creates a light so bright that it can be seen at greater distances than almost any other phenomenon can.
The signature of the Giant Arc lies in magnesium atoms that've lost a single electron, while passing through the halos of galaxies roughly 9.2 billion light-years away. Interpolating the quasar light absorbed by the atoms, the astronomers uncovered a picture of a symmetrical curve of dozens of galaxies, stretching roughly one-fifteenth the radius of
. Obviously, this structure is invisible to the naked eye, but if we could see it in the night sky, the arc of interpenetrating galaxies would span roughly 20 times the full moon's width. Twenty times!"This is a very fundamental test of the hypothesis that the universe is homogeneous on large scales," said astrophysicist Subir Sarkar at the University of Oxford, who researchers colossal structures of the cosmos, but wasn't involved in the recent work, in the report.