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Sloan Great Wall

Adapted from Wikipedia · Discoverer experience

A colorful map showing giant structures of galaxies in space, including the Sloan Great Wall, one of the largest known structures in the universe.

The Sloan Great Wall (SGW) is a huge structure in space made up of many galaxies. It is like a giant wall of these galaxies stretching across the universe. This amazing discovery was shared by scientists from Princeton University on October 20, 2003. The researchers who found it were J. Richard Gott III, Mario Jurić, and their team. They used data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to uncover this spectacular part of space. The Sloan Great Wall shows us how galaxies are arranged in the vast universe, helping scientists understand more about the cosmos. It is different from another famous structure called the CfA2 Great Wall.

The Sloan Great Wall in a DTFE reconstruction of the inner parts of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey

Size

The Sloan Great Wall is a huge wall of galaxies that measures 1.37 billion light-years in length. It is located about one billion light-years from Earth, within the area of the constellations Corvus, Hydra, and Centaurus. This wall is about 1/60 of the width of the universe that we can see and is the sixth largest known object in space.

It is longer than another similar structure called the CfA2 Great Wall, discovered in 1989. The Sloan Great Wall includes several groups of galaxies, with the biggest one named SCl 126. Some scientists think it might just be three structures that happen to line up together.

Images

The Crab Nebula is the glowing remains of a star that exploded long ago, creating beautiful clouds of gas and light in space.
A stunning view of Earth rising over the lunar horizon, captured by astronauts during the Apollo 8 mission.
An artist's illustration of HE 1523-0901, one of the oldest stars in our galaxy, located about 7,500 light-years from Earth.

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Sloan Great Wall, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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