The largest asteroid in the universe. The most massive objects in the universe. The largest group of quasars
Not always people, looking at the sky, can imagine the true dimensions of the Sun. But what can I say, even the size of the Earth itself is difficult to imagine when you stand on its surface. People are accustomed to the fact that bugs, cats and dogs are small, and they themselves are large and strong, perhaps slightly smaller than elephants, but still large. On a cosmic scale, a person cannot even be compared with a bacterium. If we consider that our planet contains 7.7 billion people living on 30% of its territory (everything else is occupied by the World Ocean), then each person individually already resembles a grain of sand. But the Earth is not even the largest planet in the solar system. But if I now tell you the figure of 2.4 billion kilometers, then you can hardly imagine how much or how little it is. Therefore, we will begin to consider the largest objects in the Universe with the examples most accessible to man, so that you have something to compare with.
We all know that beetles are small insects, the size of a maximum of a fingernail. However, some types of beetles can reach 15-17 centimeters in length. For example, the body length of titan woodcutters varies between 8-17 centimeters, but according to some sources it can reach 21 centimeters. The average height of a person ranges from 170 to 180 centimeters. This means that people are only 10 times larger than small beetles, which is nothing on the scale of the Universe, and you will soon see this. By the way, the largest working phone on Earth is a copy of Samsung SCH-R450, created by Cricket. The dimensions of the phone are 4.5 × 3.5 × 0.74 meters. The largest land animal in the world is the African elephant. Males of this species reach from 6 to 7.5 meters in length and up to 3.8 meters in height. And the largest living creature on our planet is the blue (or blue) whale. The size of the animal reaches 30 meters in length, and the weight is up to 200 tons. That is, it takes about seventeen people to get the length of a whale.
The tallest building in the world is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Burj Khalifa (the so-called building) rises 828 meters above the ground. Whatever you count for a long time, that's about 28 whales or 480 people. V Saudi Arabia on this moment the construction of the Burj Jeddah building is underway, the height of which should be 1,007 meters. If we take ten thousand such towers and put them on top of each other, then we get the length Russian Federation from west to east, namely 10,000 kilometers. This is larger than the radius of our planet, which has a standardized equatorial value of 6,378 km. The length of the equator (an imaginary line passing in the middle of the Earth and dividing it into two hemispheres) is 40,075 kilometers.
Now we get to the fun part. Our solar system consists not only of the sun and planets. Someone, of course, will immediately add that there are still satellites and asteroids. And those who have followed astronomical discoveries and disputes in recent decades also know about the existence of dwarf planets. But we will analyze everything in detail. To begin with, in 1801, the dwarf planet Ceres was discovered by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. For a whole decade, it was mistakenly considered a full-fledged planet, then it was classified as an asteroid, and only in 2006 it took its place among the dwarf planets. Ceres was previously considered the largest asteroid. The diameter of this dwarf planet is 945-950 kilometers. Now the largest asteroid in the solar system is Vesta with a diameter of 525.5 km.
Pluto (Pluto), in contrast to Ceres, which in the XXI century was "promoted", has a sadder story. From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto was believed to be the ninth planet in the solar system. However, the International Astronomical Union decided to revise the concept of "planet" in the middle of the first decade of the XXI century. According to the new classification, Pluto became the largest dwarf planet along with Eris. The diameter of the two objects is 2,376 and 2,326 kilometers, respectively. For comparison: the diameter of the moon is 3,474 kilometers. The largest satellite in the solar system revolves around Jupiter and is called Ganymede. It is one of four satellites discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Its diameter is 5,268 kilometers.
But all the objects discussed above, as you understand, are even smaller than the Earth, and we have collected here to learn about the largest objects in the Universe. Let's start with Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. The diameter of this gas giant is approximately 139,822 kilometers. Determining the largest exoplanet (the so-called planets that are outside the solar system) in the Universe is a rather difficult task, since some gas giants are so large that they look like stars, but their mass is insufficient to support nuclear reactions of hydrogen burning and turning into a star ... Discovered in 2013, HD 100546 b is believed to be the largest known exoplanet, with a diameter 6.9 times that of Jupiter. The diameter of the Sun, the closest star to the Earth, is ten times the diameter of Jupiter (or 109 times the diameter of the Earth) - 1.392 million kilometers. The mass of the Sun is 99.866% of the total mass of the entire solar system.
However, if you think that the Sun is a large object, then I will disappoint you. The largest known star in the universe is the red hypergiant UY in the constellation UY Scuti. This star has a diameter of 2.4 billion kilometers, which is 1,700 times that of the Sun! Imagine that you have drawn a circle with a diameter of 1 mm on the asphalt with chalk (you can count, just put a dot), and so the UY of the Shield will be represented by a circle with a diameter of almost two meters. If we place the UY Shield in the center of the Solar System, then its photosphere (the radiating layer of the stellar atmosphere) will cover the orbit of Jupiter. But there is one more interesting fact... The radius of the red hypergiant NML Cygnus is estimated from 1,642 to 2,755 solar radii, which means that in theory this star could be one and a half times larger than the UY Shield.
But why argue about which star is larger, if it is still crumbs compared to black holes - regions of space-time, the gravitational attraction of which is so great that even objects moving at the speed of light cannot leave them. In 2018, an object was discovered that received the rather complicated name SDSS J140821.67 + 025733.2. In fact, it is a quasar - quasi-stellar radiosource, which translated into Russian means "a radio source similar to a star." Quasars are located at the center of active galaxies and are among the brightest objects known in the Universe, emitting a thousand times more energy than, for example, the Milky Way (the galaxy in which we live). In the center of quasars there are supermassive black holes that absorb the surrounding matter, forming an accretion disk, which is the source of radiation. SDSS J140821 has a diameter of 1.17 trillion kilometers, or about one tenth of a light year.
I remembered about the astronomical unit "light year" not by chance, but so that you could at least roughly imagine the following values. Our Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 105,700 light years, which is a million times the diameter of SDSS J140821. Now look at the picture above, because it shows the largest known galaxy in the Universe so far, IC 1101. Its diameter ranges from 4 to 6 million light years. Galaxy IC 1101 is located about one billion light-years away. It contains about 100 trillion stars, while our galaxy can contain from 200 to 400 billion stars. The galaxies, in turn, are united into clusters.
First, a little background. Scientists have long noticed that our galaxy is moving at high speed in a certain direction, presumably under the influence of the gravitational forces of some massive cluster of objects. It was decided to conditionally call this cluster the "Great Attractor". However, it was not possible to consider this area for a long time due to the fact that it was hidden behind the plane of the Milky Way. Only with the advent of X-ray telescopes did astronomers manage to study the area of the Great Attractor. It turned out that there are much fewer galaxies, which means much less mass to create the necessary gravitational forces to attract the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Scientists began to peer further. And at a distance of 500-600 million light-years from Earth, they found a supermassive structure in the Shapley supercluster, which is the most massive of the 220 known superclusters of galaxies in the observable universe. It contains a mass about 10,000 times the mass of the Milky Way and 4 times the mass observed in the region of the Great Attractor. However, even this find cannot fully explain the movement of the Milky Way. So, probably, the data of scientists are still incomplete. An important role is also played by the not fully understood distribution of dark matter (the center of gravity of its clusters may not coincide with the center of gravity of the local supercluster), which determines the large-scale structure of the Universe.
In any case, reading such numbers, it is already difficult to say that a person is a big creature, right? But even these values will seem childish to you, already at the end of this paragraph. The fact is that in space there are such formations as voids (from the English void - "emptiness"). These are vast regions between galactic filaments in which galaxies and clusters are absent or almost absent, that is, relatively empty regions of space. Scientists believe that voids make up up to 50% of the volume of the Universe, and this percentage, in their opinion, will continue to grow due to superstrong gravity, which attracts all the matter around them. The largest such object recorded by mankind is located in the southern part of the constellation Eridanus. Supervoid Eridani measures 1.8 by 3 billion light years across. According to some physicists, such relic cold spots may be a reflection of another universe, caused by the quantum entanglement between universes.
At the same time, not only empty spaces, but also supermassive clusters filled with light are huge in the Universe. Discovered in 2012, the Huge-LQG Huge Quasar Group, U1.27 is the largest cluster with 73 quasars. The diameter of this object is 4 billion light years. If that tells you anything, then it's about 38 trillion kilometers. This cluster is one of the largest structures in the observable universe. 5 billion light years. This is the diameter of the Giant GRB Ring. Astronomers, studying bursts of gamma rays (huge bursts of energy that are formed as a result of the death of massive stars), found a series of nine bursts, the sources of which were located at the same distance from the Earth, which formed this structure. By itself, "ring" is just a term describing the visual representation of this phenomenon when viewed from Earth. Most likely, the giant gamma ring is a projection of a certain sphere around which gamma radiation was emitted for a relatively short period of time (about 250 million years). Now try to rest a little, because we are approaching the most incredible object, so huge that even the super voids seem small against its background.
The largest structural object in the Universe was discovered by astronomers in the framework of observing gamma radiation and received one of the most poetic names of the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown (The Hercules – Corona Borealis Great Wall). The most interesting thing is that the object received such a name thanks to a Filipino teenager who simply entered it on Wikipedia immediately after the news about the discovery of the “wall” in November 2013. The Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown is a galactic filament or wall made up of groups of galaxies connected by gravity, the size of which in its longest direction is 10 billion light years. In fact, this structure occupies about 10% of the visible Universe. Its discovery completely crossed out the existing cosmological principle of the homogeneity of the Universe. This is the basic provision of modern cosmology, according to which each observer at the same time, regardless of the place and direction of observation, discovers the same picture in the Universe on average. The scale at which uniformity should appear is 250-300 million light years. After the discovery of the Huge group of quasars measuring 4 billion light-years, which is 13.5 times the specified value, scientists were alerted. However, the existence of the Great Wall Hercules - the Northern Crown, which is more than 30 times larger than the established scale, did indeed call into question the cosmological principle. In addition, we see this wall as it was about 10 billion years ago, that is, 3.79 billion years after the Big Bang. The presence of such a huge and massive structure at such an early stage is impossible, based on the existing model of the formation of the Universe. This means that scientists still do not know anything about the world in which we live.
Although the Great Wall of Hercules - the Northern Crown is the largest structural object in the universe, our article is not yet complete. In astronomy, there is such a thing as the Cosmic Web. It is believed that all the largest structures, such as filaments, voids, superclusters, walls, and so on, form a single structure, so to speak, "the skeleton of the universe." In 2014, the work of researchers was published who managed to observe the filament of the cosmic web at a great cosmological distance, "highlighted" by a quasar. That is, the light emitted by the black hole “warmed up” the matter of the filament and made it glow. The web turned out to be about ten times more massive than theoretically assumed, and it was not possible to find an explanation for this fact. It is believed that the filaments of the Cosmic Web are a kind of bridge for the gravitational interaction between galaxies.
But you and I, most likely, will never know whether there are larger objects in the Universe, because people cannot look beyond the boundaries of the observable Universe. At the moment, the accompanying distance (the distance that does not change in time due to the expansion of space) to the most distant observed object (the surface of the last scattering of the CMB) is approximately 14 billion parsecs or 46 billion light years. Therefore, the actually observable universe for humanity is a ball centered in the solar system, with a diameter of approximately 93 billion light years.
If we draw a rough analogy, then our planet is just one atom of a small screw in the chair of a tanker floating in the ocean. So, the Earth is a small planet in the solar system, which, in turn, is part of the Milky Way. Further, our galaxy, together with the Andromeda galaxy and the Triangulum galaxy, form the Local Group of galaxies. More than 100 groups and clusters of galaxies are part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is part of the wall or Pisces – Cetus Supercluster Complex. All this is theoretically connected by the Cosmic Web and together with the cosmic voids constitutes the Universe we observe.
The universe is huge. It is difficult for us to imagine its true size. Scientists say that since the Big Bang, it has grown so much that it has. We cannot see the entire Universe, but those places that are open to our eyes also contain many secrets, mysteries and other unusual things. In the past we have already written about. Today we'll talk about single ones: starting from the largest asteroid and ending with the largest galaxy in the visible space of space.
Reference: One light year is a unit of measurement for distance in astronomy, equal to the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Earth year.
The largest asteroid in the solar system
Previously, the largest asteroid in the solar system was Ceres. The diameter of the object is about 950 kilometers. The second largest was Pallas with a diameter of 512 kilometers. And Vesta occupied the third line of the largest known asteroids in the solar system, inferior in size to Pallas, but overtaking it in mass.
After scientists were transferred to the category of dwarf planets, Pallas began to occupy the top line of the largest (in size) asteroids in the solar system. However, astronomers have specified the size of Vesta and it turned out that it is larger than Pallas. The diameter of Vesta is 530 kilometers. Thus, Vesta has become not only the largest, but also the most massive asteroid in our solar system.
The largest satellite of the planet in the solar system
Comparative sizes of Ganymede with other satellites of the solar system and the Earth
The gas giant Jupiter's satellite Ganymede is the largest satellite in the solar system. Its diameter is 5268 kilometers.
Ganymede is one of the four largest moons of Jupiter, which, along with Io, Europa and Callisto, was first discovered by the Italian mathematician, philosophers and astronomer Galileo Galilei. The name Ganymede was not used until the middle of the 20th century. Galileo called the satellites discovered by him "the Medici planets", and Ganymede himself called Jupiter III or "the third moon of Jupiter."
Scientists believe that under the surface of Ganymede, which contains much more water than on Earth.
The largest satellite of an exoplanet
The star WASP-12, located 870 light years away, has an exoplanet. Recall that exoplanets are planets that are outside the solar system.
In 2012, the planet WASP-12b was investigated by Russian scientists. They assumed she had a satellite. This possibility was based on an analysis of the brightness (brightness) of the star. From the features of the brightness changes, one can calculate what fraction of the stellar disk area is covered by the satellite. Scientists believe that the satellite has a radius of 0.57 that of Jupiter (6.4 times the size of Earth). Such a large size made it possible to assume the existence of a satellite.
The largest planet in the solar system
With a diameter of 142,984 kilometers, Jupiter is the most big planet Solar system. Along with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, Jupiter is classified as gas giant.
Jupiter's mass is 318 times that of Earth. It is 2.5 times heavier than all the other planets in the solar system combined. The giant is located at a distance of about 770 million kilometers from the Sun and makes a complete revolution around the star in about 11.9 Earth years.
Perhaps the most famous feature of Jupiter is its (BKP) - a hurricane that has lasted more than 300 years on the planet. The diameter of the Spot is greater than the diameter of the Earth.
The largest rocky exoplanet
Artistic representation of the planet BD + 20594 b
The largest rocky exoplanet was discovered by the Kepler space telescope in 2016 in the constellation Aries, which is 500 light-years away. The object, designated BD + 20594b, is about 16 times heavier than Earth and has a radius 2.2 times that of Earth.
Previously, the largest rocky exoplanet was considered Kepler-10 c. it was said that this planet has a radius that is 2.35 times that of the Earth, and its mass is about 17 more than that of the Earth. However, more accurate calculations carried out in 2017 made it possible to establish that the planet Kepler-10c is only 7.4 times heavier than Earth, and its composition is closer to gas giants.
The largest gas giant outside the solar system
Determining the largest exoplanet of the gas giant class is not an easy task. Scientists have many things to consider. For example, there are objects in space that are so huge that they can hardly be called planets. They are more like a star. At the same time, their mass is less than the minimum required to support nuclear reactions of hydrogen combustion and transformation into a star. Such objects are usually called substellar.
Supposedly the largest gas giant-class exoplanet discovered so far is HD 100546 b, discovered in 2013. It is located 337 light years from Earth. Scientists believe that HD 100546 b is 6.9 times larger and 20 times heavier than Jupiter.
The largest star in the universe
Currently the most a big star not only in our Milky Way galaxy, but also in the known Universe is the red hypergiant UY Shield. It is located about 9,500 light-years from us. According to scientists, the radius of the UY of the Shield is equal to 1708 solar radii, but it is constantly changing and can reach 2100 solar radii. The star is 2.4 billion kilometers in diameter.
This could be a galactic wall billions of light years from Earth.
A supercluster of 830 galaxies located at a distance of 4.5-6.4 billion light years from the solar system was discovered by an international team of scientists, which included representatives of the UK, Spain, the United States and Estonia. Astrophysicists suggest that the galactic wall they discovered is the largest object in the universe known to date.
The Milky Way is part of a supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea, whose center of gravity is located in a gravitational anomaly called the Great Attractor. Until now, only a group of galaxies called the Sloan Great Wall could compete with it in size. However, the new object, discovered using the BOSS (Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey) database, claims an absolute record. It is assumed that its mass is about 10 thousand times greater than that of the Milky Way, New Scientist reports.
As some researchers note, today the question of what exactly can be considered a "cosmic object" and how to determine its boundaries if we are talking about a set of galaxies remains largely controversial. The criterion could be considered the simultaneous movement of all galaxies included in the supercluster in outer space, however, it is not possible to verify this from such a huge distance at the current level of technology development.
It is also noted that there are potential competitors at the BOSS galactic wall, which claims to be the largest object in the Universe. Some researchers pay attention to the clusters of quasars, which look as if the quasars in them represent a certain system. However, if a connection between them really exists, it is impossible to explain such a structure from the point of view of modern cosmological theories, therefore the BOSS galactic wall is a more "realistic" candidate, experts say.
17 december 2018The size of the universe is unknown. He only only excites our thoughts. But in the night sky there are plenty of objects that will surprise you with their scale. Let's take a closer look at them.
1. Supervoid (size - 1.8 billion light years)
With the help of the WMAP and Planck devices, we were able to examine the relic radiation in the smallest detail. The essence of the study is to understand the state of the world in the first moments of its "transparency".
After the Big Bang for 380 thousand years. Space did not emit light. The temperature and density of the substance were so strong that radiation could not penetrate through them.
And only at the moment when the radiation received space for propagation, it became possible to "see" at least something. The relic radiation is the remainder of this event. Anyone can see it on an old TV on an "empty" channel where there are ripples. A large percentage of this ripple is a relic background.
With the help of the above satellites, it became possible to see the early picture of the Universe, in particular, its temperature fluctuations. It turned out that they are insignificant and can be attributed to error and random fluctuations. Despite this, the CMB map contains a lot of information.
With its help, astrophysicists were able to detect the coldest part of the Cosmos. He was called supervoid (super void). From our point of view, this is not absolutely nothing - there are many objects here. However, their number is one third less than in the surrounding area.
The reasons for the formation of such a huge spot are not yet intelligible.
2. Shapley Supercluster (8000 galaxies)
The total mass of this cluster of galaxies is more than 10 million billion solar masses. Located - in the constellation Centaurus.
For a long time, the object was out of sight, as it was hidden by the Milky Way. With the help of X-ray telescopes, it was possible to see the attractor that attracts our and neighboring galaxies.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was discovered by the American astronomer H. Shapley, after whom it was named. Its attraction is so strong that our entire galaxy is attracted to it at a speed of 2.2 million km. in hour.
3. Laniakeya (size - 520 million light years)
It has long been determined that objects in space do not stand still: some scatter from each other, while others, on the contrary, approach each other. Despite the enormous speed of these processes, we practically do not feel this visually, since the cosmic distances are even more enormous.
The whole process will take several billion years.
4. Gamma-ring (length - 5 billion light years)
The rays from this gamma source spread over 5 billion sv. years. With the help of instruments, 9 successive gamma-ray bursts of colossal strength were recorded in a small area of the sky. If we could see this process with the naked eye, we could see a red ring in the sky larger than the moon.
The reason for this formation is not yet clear. There is speculation that a group of galaxies could have spawned it. Quasars in these structures, at short intervals, emitted huge jets of gamma rays, which were captured.
5. The Great Wall in Hercules and the Northern Crown (size - 10 billion light years)
If you explore the space in the constellations of Crown Corona and Hercules, you will find an increased amount of gamma rays.
Since these events often occur in this location, apparently there is some kind of large object that is associated with them. It is estimated to be up to 10 billion light-years across. It must be a colossal cluster of galaxies and dark matter.
As it turned out later, the size of the object covers not only these two constellations. But once the name stuck (thanks to a teenager who wrote about the object on Wikipedia), it was left.
As you can see, the Cosmos is filled with rather strange formations. Some of them question the well-established hypotheses of the formation of the Universe. On the other hand, it allows looking for answers to new questions in modern science.
The oceans are, of course, vast, and the mountains are impressive in their size. 7 billion people is also not a small number. Since we live on planet Earth (which is 12,742 km in diameter), it's easy for us to forget how tiny we really are. In order to realize this, all we have to do is look into the night sky. Looking into it, it becomes clear that we are just a particle of dust in an unimaginably huge universe. The list of objects below will help you see the greatness of a person in perspective.
10. Jupiter
The largest planet (diameter 142.984 km)
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Ancient astronomers called Jupiter the king of the Roman gods. Jupiter is the 5th planet from the Sun. Its atmosphere is 84% hydrogen and 15% helium with minor additions of acetylene, ammonia, ethane, methane, phosphite, and water vapor. Jupiter's mass is 318 times that of Earth, and its diameter is 11 times that of Earth. Jupiter's mass is 70% of the mass of all other planets in our solar system. Jupiter's volume can accommodate 1,300 Earth-sized planets. Jupiter has 63 known satellites (moons), but almost all of them are very small and dim.
9. Sun
The largest object in the solar system (diameter 1.391.980 km) 
The sun (yellow dwarf star) is the largest object in the solar system. Its mass is 99.8% of the entire mass of the solar system, and the mass of Jupiter takes up almost everything else. At the moment, the mass of the Sun consists of 70% hydrogen and 28% helium. All other components (metals) occupy less than 2%. The percentages change very slowly as the Sun converts hydrogen to helium in its core. Conditions in the Sun's core, which occupies about 25% of the star's radius, are extreme. The temperature reaches 15.6 million degrees Kelvin, and the pressure reaches 250 billion atmospheres. The Sun's power of 386 billion megawatts is provided by nuclear fusion reactions. Every second about 700,000,000 tons of hydrogen is converted into 695,000,000 tons of helium and 5,000,000 tons of energy in the form of gamma rays.
8. Solar system
Our solar system consists of a central star (the Sun) and nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, as well as numerous moons, millions of rocky asteroids and billions of icy comets.
7. VY Big Dog(VY CMa)
The largest star in the universe (3 billion kilometers in diameter) 
The VY Canis Majoris (VY Canis Majoris) is the largest and also one of the most bright stars known at the moment. It is a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major. Its radius is 1800-2200 times greater than that of the Sun, and its diameter is 3 billion kilometers. If it were placed in our solar system, its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Saturn. Some astronomers disagree with this statement and believe that VY Canis Major is actually much smaller, only 600 times larger than the Sun, and would only stretch to the orbit of Mars.
6. Largest amount of water ever found
Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest body of water ever found in the universe. The giant cloud, 12 billion years old, carries 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. A cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called Quasar, located 12 billion light-years from Earth. According to scientists, this discovery proved that water predominated in the universe throughout its existence.
5. Extremely huge supermassive black holes
(21 billion times the mass of the Sun) 
Supermassive black hole is the largest type of black hole in the galaxy, ranging in size from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses. It is believed that most, if not all, galaxies, including the Milky Way, contain a supermassive black hole at the center. One of these newly discovered monsters, weighing 21 billion times the mass of the Sun, is a vortex of egg-shaped stars. Known as NGC 4889, it is the brightest galaxy in a spreading cloud of thousands of galaxies. This cloud is located 336 million light-years from the constellation Coma Berenices. This black hole is so big that our entire solar system would fit there about a dozen times.
4. Milky Way
100,000-120,000 light years in diameter 
The Milky Way is a closed spiral galaxy with a diameter of 100,000-120,000 light years and containing 200-400 billion stars. It can contain at least as many planets, 10 billion of which can orbit in the habitable zone of its parent stars.
3. El Gordo "El Gordo"
Largest galaxy cluster (2 × 1015 solar masses) 
El Gordo is located more than 7 billion light-years from Earth, which means that it has been observed since birth. According to scientists involved in the study, this cluster of galaxies is the most massive, hottest and emitting more X-rays than any other known cluster at this distance or even further.
The central galaxy in the middle of El Gordo is unusually bright and has amazing blue beams at optical wavelengths. The authors believe that this extreme galaxy was formed as a result of the collision and merger of two galaxies at the center of each cluster.
Using data from the Spitzer space telescope and optical images, it has been calculated that about 1% of the cluster's mass is occupied by stars, while everything else is hot gas filling the gaps between stars and visible by the Chandra telescope. This gas-to-star ratio is consistent with results from other massive clusters.
2. Universe
Estimated size 156 billion light years 
A picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this one and try to imagine / understand how big our Universe is. The mind-blowing numbers are listed below. Here is a link to the full-size image.
Earth 1.27 × 104 km
Sun 1.39 × 106 km
Solar System 2.99 × 1010 km or 0.0032 light years
Solar interstellar space 6.17 × 1014 km or 65 light years
Milky Way 1.51 × 1018 km or 160, .00 light years
Local Group of Galaxies 3.1 × 1019 km or 6.5 million light years
Local Supercluster 1.2 × 1021 km or 130 million light years
Universe 1.5 × 1024 km or 156 billion light years (but no one knows for sure)
1. Multiverse
Imagine not one, but many universes existing at the same time. The multiverse (or meta-universe) is a hypothetical set of many possible universes (including the historical universe in which we exist). Together they form everything that exists and can exist: the commonality of space, time, matter and energy, as well as physical laws and constants that describe them. But, again, there is no proof of the existence of a multiverse, so it may well be that our universe is the largest.
