The biggest structure in the Universe ever discovered is too big to possibly comprehend

The largest structure in the known universe has been discovered by astronomers and, as you might guess, it is absolutely massive.

The newfound structure has been named Quipu after the ancient, knot-based counting system used by the Inca People of South America. This system was also used for record keeping and is made up of colour-coded cords that are all attached to a larger strand. Each strand has knots tied in certain locations and Quipu (the cosmic one) has over-densities with bigger clusters along its strands.

Just like a Quipu cord, this humongous structure in the known universe is complex - it’s a group of galaxy clusters that extends around 1.3 billion light-years across and contains 200 quadrillion solar masses.

The Milky Way for example is about 100,000 light years across, making Quipu more than 13,000 times its length.

Quipu is now one of five large cosmic structures found between 424 million and 815 million light-years from Earth and all together they contain 45 percent of all galaxy clusters. Quipu is the largest of these structures in the near universe.

Scientists are still trying to map the distribution of matter in the universe at different wavelengths of light.

Future studies could look at how large-scale structures have impacted the the way the universe evolved, the researchers wrote in the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and can be read on the preprint server arXiv here.

The universe is expanding - but there's a problem

One thing we do know is that the universe is expanding. Observations by Edwin Hubble who provided the first observational evidence in 1929 that the more distant a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be stretching back into space. This suggests that the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions. This law states that the velocity at which a galaxy recedes from us is directly proportional to its distance.

Hubble proposed the ‘Hubble constant’ to describe the universe's rate of expansion and scientists discovered that the rate of the universe's expansion is increasing in the late 1990s. The current accepted explanation of this is a mysterious force called “dark energy”.

The universe's expansion can be measured by looking at the distance of objects in the nearby universe and how fast they're moving away, or by measuring fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the leftover heat from the Big Bang — in the early universe.

The 'Hubble tension' refers to the disagreement between these two methods of measuring how fast the universe is expanding. Measurements from the distant, early universe suggest a slower expansion rate compared to those from the nearby, more recent universe. It's no wonder scientists are puzzled by this and it's considered a big problem in physics.

However a recent study suggested an even deeper mystery than the Hubble tension may exist and a separate study found that the universe is expanding faster than our current understanding of physics can comprehend.

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