The cosmos has a cellular appearance with massive “walls” and filaments of supercluster galaxies separated by vast voids. The observable cosmos appears to be 14.7 billion light-years across, but the effective diameter is 92-94 billion light-years. The largest known structure is the Sloan Great Wall, 1.37 billion light-years long. Our galaxy is in the Virgo supercluster, which is pulled towards the Grand Attractor, the largest known concentration of mass in the universe.
At the highest observable scales, corresponding to billions of light years, the cosmos has a cellular appearance, made up of massive “walls” and filaments of supercluster galaxies separated by vast voids, the largest of which (the Eridanus void) is a billion light-years wide. Although the observable cosmos as a whole appears to be about 14.7 billion light-years across, this is an illusion, because much of the light in the universe has taken billions of years to reach us. The effective diameter of the observable cosmos is 92-94 billion light years.
At scales greater than about 500 million light-years, no large-scale structure is evident, as the cosmos is homogeneous and random in any direction, exemplifying the so-called Cosmological Principle. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “End of Greatness”. Because the real universe can be many times larger than the observable universe, the notion of specific structure can only be applicable to the smallest scales.
The largest known structure in the cosmos is the Sloan Great Wall, discovered in 2003, 1.37 billion light-years long and located about 1 billion light-years away. Since the galaxies in Sloan’s Great Wall aren’t actually gravitationally bound, like our Local Group, it’s technically not a structure, but it’s usually referred to as one anyway. Prior to the discovery of Sloan’s Great Wall, the “Great Wall” simply referred to as the “Great Wall” was the largest known structure, approximately 500 million light-years long and 200 million wide, with a width of only 15 million light-years.
Our galaxy is nestled in a much larger structure called the Virgo supercluster, made up of about 100 galactic groups, 200 million light-years in diameter. The Virgo supercluster as a whole is pulled towards a gravitational anomaly in the adjacent Hydra-Centaurus supercluster known as the Grand Attractor. The Great Attractor is the largest known concentration of mass in the universe, equal to about 10,000 typical galaxies. Attempts to study it more closely are overshadowed by the galactic disk of the Milky Way.
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