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The South Pole Wall (SPW or The South Pole Wall) is a massive cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

galaxy filament In cosmology, galaxy filaments (subtypes: supercluster complexes, galaxy walls, and galaxy sheets) Boris V. Komberg, Andrey V. Kravtsov, Vladimir N. Lukash; "The search and investigation of the Large Groups of Quasars" ; ;R.G. Clowes; "Large Qu ...

) that extends across at least 1.37 billion light-years of space, the nearest light (and consequently part) of which is aged about half a billion light-years. The structure, in its astronomical angle, is dense in five known places including one very near to the celestial South Pole and is, according to the international team of astronomers that discovered the South Pole Wall, "...the largest contiguous feature in the local volume and comparable to the

Sloan Great Wall The Sloan Great Wall (SGW) is a cosmic structure formed by a giant wall of galaxies (a galaxy filament). Its discovery was announced from Princeton University on October 20, 2003, by J. Richard Gott III, Mario Jurić, and their colleagues, b ...

at half the distance ...". Its discovery was announced by

Daniel Pomarède Daniel Pomarède (born October 3, 1971) is a staff scientist at the Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe, CEA Paris-Saclay University. He co-discovered Laniakea, a home supercluster of galaxies. Specialized in data ...

Paris-Saclay University Paris-Saclay University (french: Université Paris-Saclay) is a public research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that emerged from the division of the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne. ...

and R. Brent Tully and colleagues of the

University of Hawaiʻi The University of Hawaiʻi System, formally the University of Hawaiʻi and popularly known as UH, is a public college and university system that confers associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees through three universities, seven com ...

in July 2020. Pomarède explained, "One might wonder how such a large and not-so distant structure remained unnoticed. This is due to its location in a region of the sky that has not been completely surveyed, and where direct observations are hindered by foreground patches of galactic dust and clouds. We have found it thanks to its gravitational influence, imprinted in the velocities of a sample of galaxies".

Size

The wall measures over 1.37 billion

light-year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...

s in length, and spans a large zone 500 million light-years away. The massive structure, at least to a very small extent, is behind the

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye ...

galaxy A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

Zone of Avoidance The Zone of Avoidance (ZOA, ZoA), or Zone of Galactic Obscuration (ZGO), is the area of the sky that is obscured by the Milky Way. The Zone of Avoidance was originally called the Zone of Few Nebulae in an 1878 paper by English astronomer Richard ...

(or Zone of Galactic Obscuration). NOTE: "The 'Zone of Galactic Obscuration' is, simply as it says, an area of the sky where the hub of the Milky Way galaxy itself makes observations very difficult by obscuring what is going on. This is defined purely by our location relative to the galactic hub, and is not an actual object in itself." The filament curves from the Perseus constellation in the Northern Hemisphere to

Telescopium Telescopium is a minor constellation in the southern celestial hemisphere, one of twelve named in the 18th century by French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille and one of several depicting scientific instruments. Its name is a Latinized form ...

in the far south, in between which, skirting – slightly – over the present south celestial pole itself. It is so large that it greatly affects the local expansion of the universe. According to astronomer Tully, "We wonder if the South Pole Wall is much bigger than what we see. What we have mapped stretches across the full domain of the region we have surveyed. We are early explorers of the cosmos, extending our maps into unknown territory." According to the astronomers who discovered it "We will not be certain of its full extent, nor whether it is unusual, until we map the universe on a significantly grander scale."

References and footnotes

External links

South Pole Wall – Official Site
* (Daniel Pomarède; 10 July 2020) Astronomical objects discovered in 2020 Galaxy filaments {{astronomy-stub

Size

See also

References and footnotes

External links