South Pole Wall
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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. ...
(a
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 of Paris-Saclay University and
R. Brent Tully Richard Brent Tully (born March 9, 1943) is a Canadian-born American astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii. Born in Toronto, Ontario, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tully's specialty is the astrophysics of gal ...
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. ...
's
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 Perseus is a constellation in the northern sky, being named after the Greek mythological hero Perseus. It is one of the 48 ancient constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and among the 88 modern constellations defined by t ...
in the Northern Hemisphere to Telescopium 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."


See also

* BOSS Great Wall * CMB cold spot *
Giant Void The Giant Void (also known as the Giant Void in NGH, Canes Venatici Supervoid, and AR-Lp 36) is an extremely large region of space with an underdensity of galaxies and located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is the second-largest-confir ...
* Great Attractor *
Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall The Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall or simply the Great Wall is the largest known structure in the observable universe, measuring approximately 10 billion light-years in length (the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years in di ...
* Large-scale structure of the observable universe *
List of largest cosmic structures This is a list of the largest cosmic structures so far discovered. The unit of measurement used is the light-year (distance traveled by light in one Julian year; approximately 9.46 trillion kilometres). This list includes superclusters, galaxy ...
*
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 ...
*
The Giant Arc The Giant Arc is a large-scale structure discovered in June 2021 that spans 3.3 billion light years. The structure of galaxies exceeds the 1.2 billion light year threshold, challenging the cosmological principle that at large enough scales the ...
* Big Ring


References and footnotes


External links


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