The 15 Largest Things in the Universe

in significant significant I can't think of a better single word to describe what learning about the universe makes us feel like Carl Sagan said it best when he stated astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience and that in the vast scale of the universe we have good reason for humility however that's certainly not the only thing most people feel the census of aw and amazement at the sights and environments existing in space that we have been able to observe with increasing focus as technology advances are also common feelings in other words space is so cool though before we begin it would probably be best to clarify what the video title really means it could more accurately read the 15 supposedly largest features objects structures and things in the universe arbitrarily organized by type that humans currently know of as of August 2017 doesn't really roll off the tongue though but without further delay let's get existential number 15 the largest crater utopia basin Mars has had a pretty tough time since its formation technically Mars falls just within the habitable zone making it close enough to the Sun to support liquid water but 500 million years after its formation 4.6 billion years ago it's somehow lost its internal dynamo destroying its magnetic field which meant no more atmosphere or liquid water there are two theories as to why this is the first being that Mars is too small to support a magnetic field for long and the second is that Mars lost quite a bit of material and had its convection greatly disrupted by some truly massive impacts utopia basin was most likely formed by one such collision using kansas for comparison let's look at the size of Chicxulub crater caused by a ten kilometer meteorite and thought to be the final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs next we'll look at the Rita Ford crater the largest confirmed crater on earth at 300 kilometers in diameter with a 12 to 15 kilometer impact door now let's compare these two Utopia basin yeah it's that big that's 3200 kilometers in diameter the distance from Las Vegas to Washington DC that's almost the diameter of our moon the object that struck Mars would have been over 100 kilometers across and must have caused a colossal impact changing the geography of half of the planet perhaps killing off all chances Mars had for housing life nearly 4 billion years ago number 14 the largest asteroid one series all that talk about potentially apocalyptic meteorite strikes earlier does inspire another question what's the largest asteroid that we know of hundreds of thousands of them have been discovered thus far but there may be billions of them larger than 50 meters in size in our own solar system the largest asteroid was also the very first discovered in 1801 by Sep apic which he named series yes he named B 945 kilometer in diameter lifeless ball of rock and ice after the Roman goddess of agriculture NASA's space probe Dawn entered series as orbit on March 6 2015 and has been taking high-resolution photos of the surface of Ceres since then the two features that stick out most on the cratered surface of Ceres are very reflective bright spots and a lone mountain on its surface scientists theorized that the bright spots are simply ice or salt but the mountain was something exciting ahuna Mons was the name given to the mountain and it is one of the tallest in the solar system at four kilometers high scientists believe the mountain was formed by volcanic activity not with magma minds you but instead water that means ahuna Mons was formed by a cryovolcano or cold volcano that erupts water and methane instead of melted silicate rock that coupled with the fact that Ceres may contain more water than all of the fresh water on earth makes it a seriously cool asteroid haha I wouldn't have left it that either number thirteen the largest moon Ganymede Jupiter is it's so big that 1300 earths could fit inside of it with room to spare so it's no surprise that it also has the gravity to hold on to a whopping 67 moons three of which are actually larger than our own moon Ganymede is the largest of Jupiter's moons and the largest in the solar system at five thousand two hundred and sixty-eight kilometers in diameter it even Dwarfs mercury but that's not the only thing special about Ganymede it's also the only moon in the solar system to have a magnetic field of its own most likely due to a liquid iron core around 40% of Ganymede's composition is ice and the other 60% of rocky material which is easily seen on its surface as the darker cratered areas but 100 kilometers underneath the surface of rock and ice is another wonder possible oceans of water kept liquid by high salt content and perhaps the heat Ganymede's kohler europa another of jupiter's business also houses liquid water beneath its surface though it is far more likely to possibly house life compared to Ganymede number 12 the largest planet rocks 42 B B object several times more massive than Jupiter that are unable to fuse hydrogen in their cores are commonly referred to as brown dwarfs but the line between what counts as a planet and a brown dwarf is fuzzy for the sake of not taking 10 minutes on this subject alone I'll just go with part of the International Astronomical Union stance and say that a planet is any planet sized object that doesn't fuse anything at all so since planetary bodies 13 times the mass of Jupiter confused deuterium I'll define the largest planet as something just under that discovered in 2013 rocks 42 B B has a radius 2.5 times the size of Jupiter's at around 175,000 kilometers and a mass of 6 to 12 times that of Jupiter's please note that measuring the physical characteristics of faraway planets is difficult and subject to change as imaging techniques of all so here are a few of the closest competitors for the largest known planet focusing once again on the current largest planet rocks 42 B V is around 140 astronomical units from its host binary star that 30 times further than Jupiter is from our Sun and 3 times the distance of Pluto to our Sun rocks 42 B B's enormity and distance from its host star is an on circumstance that has many astronomers wondering how it formed especially considering how young the solar system is the solar system is just one to three million years old and relatively close at four hundred light years away in the breathtaking Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex so perhaps further study may bring us closer to understanding how oddball planets and brown dwarfs form number eleven the largest star uy scuti there are a couple of provisos that come with naming the largest star in the universe first measuring the exact size of a star when it's hundreds to millions of light-years away is difficult especially when the luminosity can vary over time because of this there's a margin of error that can place large stars over 100 solar radii smaller or larger than its estimate currently you my scooty is believed to be the largest star at 1708 plus or minus 192 solar radii at a distance of nine thousand five hundred light years from Earth using that estimate you my scoot eye is nearly five billion times the volume of the Sun it's hard to appreciate just how monumental that is so let's do a quick size comparison here's the earth in comparison to our Sun it would take about 109 Earth's to fit the size of the sun's diameter and 1.3 million earths to fill up the Suns total volume now here are the earth and Sun compared to you I scoot I unfortunately we lack the budget to illustrate it but nearly 6.5 quadrillion earths would be needed to fill up you I scoot eyes average volume that's 6.5 million billion earths because this is most likely impossible to imagine try imagining if our Sun was scaled down to the size of a tennis ball to scale you I scoot I would be slightly larger than the Ericsson Globe a 28 story tall hemispherical building with the diameter of 110 meters capable of holding nearly 14,000 spectators for hockey matches and earth would be a grain of sand just over half a millimeter in diameter you I scoot eyes colossal size is fleeting though as it is expected to fuse its supply of lighter elements in the next million years before going supernova and forming a stellar black hole or neutron star number 10 the largest black hole s500 1/4 plus 81 the same provisos mentioned for the largest star apply here as well but even more so as the largest possible black holes known range from millions to billions of light-years away from us the event horizon of a black hole is the point at which nothing not even light can escape its gravity an accretion disk is the material including dust planets and even stars orbiting the black hole outside of its event horizon the phenomenal brightness coming from an accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole is what we call a quasar but the luminosity of s500 1/4 plus 81 is in a special class of super bright quasars known as blaze ARS s500 1/4 plus 81 s accretion disk is one of the brightest in the universe and is 25,000 times brighter than every one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy combined its event horizon the sphere of matter that doesn't allow even light to escape is monstrously huge at 237 billion kilometers in diameter that would engulf our entire solar system up to Pluto's orbit 37 times over and its mast perhaps 40 billion times the mass of our Sun though exact measurement is difficult for comparison's sake a regular stellar-mass black hole is just 3 to 4 times the mass of our Sun the largest nebula NGC 604 nebula is a sort of nebulous term if you'll forgive the horrible pun so to narrow things down h2 regions will be what are specifically compared as they make up some of the most spectacular sights in our skies and are crucial for star development to NGC 604 is the largest h2 region known and is a mammoth star creating engine 1,500 light-years across located in the Triangulum galaxy it's so bright and enormous that it would outshine Venus in our sky if as close as the famous Orion Nebula there are no doubt larger h2 regions elsewhere in the universe but due to their faint nature we have yet to have discovered them as they simply clouds of dust strung out over light-years of space nebulae get their brightness from stars forming within the dust giving off incredible hues of color though once h2 regions begin producing stars their days are numbered the very stars h2 region's produce ionize the dust with intense light rays over time and once a supergiant star born within the dust goes supernova it will blow away most of the dust after thousands of years because of this h2 regions only last for a few million years at a time so enjoy viewing the stunning star nurseries while you can number eight the largest galaxy I see one one zero one when determining the largest galaxy in the universe it's important to mention that the largest galaxies known are usually millions to billions of light-years away which makes accurately determining their size difficult due to the way light diffuses through space from that distance our own Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 lightyears give or take a few thousand light years and is populated by 100 to 400 billion stars that's so huge it's already difficult to visualize but our galaxy is only mid-sized the universe is vast and within it are some truly gargantuan galaxies I see one one zero one a brilliant yellow supergiant elliptical to lenticular galaxies is the largest that we currently know of with a diameter of perhaps four million light years give or take a few hundred thousand light years at that size I see one one zero one could contain 10 to 100 trillion stars each with their own solar systems and possible planets all at a distance of over 1 billion light-years from us what determines the boundaries of a galaxy is also uncertain for now so although I see 1 1 0 1 has the largest halo of diffuse light it is debated whether or not we should accept the gas surrounding the galaxies reflecting light as part of the galaxies though even with that caveat I see 1 1 0 1 is the largest galaxy currently known to us and even larger ones may yet to have been discovered number seven the largest galaxy proto cluster newfound blob within the early universe giant clouds of hydrogen gas began coalescing into what would become blueprints for galaxies and galaxy clusters discovered in 2005 by a Tohoku University research group newfound blob which is just a placeholder name so you don't have to refer to it as this long string of characters has a length of 200 million light years but that's not all it's measured to be over 12 billion light years away from Earth meaning that its structure formed just 2 billion years after the start of the universe this structure is made up of hundreds to thousands of galaxies and proto galaxies as well as bubbles of hydrogen gas lit up by the stars forming at rates hundreds of times higher than our own galaxy that we call lyman-alpha blobs lyman-alpha blobs are rare giant structures of hydrogen gas emitting light along the lyman-alpha line meaning that with a special filter large blobs of heated hydrogen can be seen in space at great distances from us though only a few hundred lyman-alpha blobs are cataloged most are tens to hundreds of thousands of light-years in size and even though many are larger than our own galaxy they are several times more dense than normal regions of space that density is important because it likely means that lyman-alpha blobs are precursors to galaxy clusters which aligns quite nicely with the hundreds of lyman-alpha blobs found within newfound blob number six the largest supercluster horologium supercluster speaking of superclusters the horologium reticulum supercluster usually abbreviated as horologium supercluster is the largest super cluster of galaxies that we currently know of at a length of 550 million light years super clusters of galaxies are exactly as they sound giant collections of hundreds of thousands of galaxies loosely gravitationally bound to one another within a large field in space the galaxies we call home is also a part of a super cluster our solar system is a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy itself in a small group of galaxies relatively near us that we call the local group and that local group is just a tiny portion of the Virgo supercluster that we belong to which may itself just be an arm of the proposed Laniakea super cluster though proposed Laniakea and horologium super clusters are actually very similar in size though from what we know right now horologium is currently the largest proposed super cluster and lies in a whopping 700 million light-years away from Earth knowing that galaxies seem to group together due to gravitational ties and the barely understood dark matter shouldn't that mean that there are areas in the universe that are empty by comparison as well number 5 the largest void giant void the vastness of what we've covered so far is already incredibly difficult to comprehend and both the size and the time it would take to traverse even relatively small areas such as our own galaxy make many fill miniscule and isolated on our tiny planet but perhaps we should feel lucky that our galaxy is located on the outskirts of a large super cluster instead of drifting as a lone galaxy in a void the loneliest areas in the universe Andromeda is one of our closest neighbors at 2.5 million light-years away but in a void the distance to other galaxies and clusters can be tens to hundreds of millions of light-years away if our galaxy was alone adrift in a large void our guys would be a little darker and we wouldn't have known other galaxies existed at all until the mid 20th century 1.5 billion light years from our galaxy lies the aptly named giant void its size Dwarfs the largest super cluster we know of at more than 1 billion light-years in diameter it's so large that there are even a few isolated galaxy clusters within it none of which are gravitationally bound as they are so distant from one another if the thought of super voids fills you with existential dread I'm afraid you'll be bummed to hear that we aren't exactly located in a galactic metropolis in fact new evidence supporting the existence of the kvc void was recently announced and may soon be confirmed as the new largest super void that we know of at 2 billion light-years in diameter our galaxy as well as much of the Laniakea super cluster is located within it putting a substantial obstacle between us and the greater universe at least we can take comfort in the fact that we're not alone or near the center of the kvc void a fate a few less fortunate galaxies will share number 4 the largest quasar group huge large quasar group no you didn't miss hear that it really is called the huge large quasar group usually shortened to huge LQG and yes I agree that it's a terrible name if you look far enough into the past you should be able to see multiple black holes gravitationally bound to one another each with bright active quasars that would lay the foundations for galaxy clusters and filaments to form at 9 billion light years away the 73 quasars that make up the proposed huge lqg extend over a distance of 4 billion light years a number which may violate the current cosmological principle due to the size and density of the structure the cosmological principle states that at large enough scales the universe is isotropic and homogeneous basically meaning that if you captured large cubes of space at different in the universe they should contain about the same amount of matter since the size of the cubes are currently calculated to be anywhere from 300 million to 1.5 billion light years a few large quasar groups galaxy walls and filaments and the possible super Voight related to the CMB cold spot lie outside of the cosmological principle though the principal and these findings are still widely debated among astronomers I think we found that it's just charged okay unless unless it's your degree and all that's just giant number three here we are at the largest singular probable structure that we currently know of the Hercules Corona borealis great wall is a Titanic sounding name fitting of a structure possibly extending six to ten billion light years across though the name is a misnomer as it isn't confined to just the Hercules and Corona borealis constellations the great gamma-ray burst wall or great GRB wall is a much more fitting name as it describes the means through which this possible structure was discovered when hyper giant stars collapse the North and South Poles of the forming black hole shoot out violent beams of energy which we call gamma-ray bursts usually these bursts are randomly distributed at different distances from one another but many of the 44-percent redshift too were discovered to be statistically close to one another in a region of the sky including half of the constellations Draco Lyra and Bootes as well as the entirety of Hercules and Corona borealis this led to the hypothesis of an enormous gravitationally bound structure ten billion light-years away from us encompassing almost an eighth of our sky to explain the anisotropic clustering of the bursts there is currently a debate over whether the great GRB wall is a super cluster or galaxy filament as its round shape is usually indicative of a super cluster of galaxies the issue with that is its size being twenty times larger than the largest super cluster currently known whatever the case galaxies within the great Arby wall would number in the billions with trillions upon trillions of stars located within number to the largest structure in the universe the cosmic web our planet is a small part of the larger solar system which itself is a part of the larger Milky Way galaxy our galaxy is a part of the local group of galaxies which is a part of the much larger Virgo supercluster and perhaps the even larger Laniakea super cluster between these super clusters are vast voids comparatively devoid of matter forming expansive empty spaces with filaments of galaxies forming around them where most matter collects the cosmic web is thought to be a connected network of dark matter filaments that binds nearly all matter together throughout the universe sort of like a web that extends in all directions with super clusters and galaxies filaments making up the strands of the web and the empty spaces being boys you can imagine it like the inside of a foam or even a sponge but personally my favorite comparison is how similar simulations of the cosmic web look to the neural pathways of a brain a constantly moving interconnected structure extending throughout the entirety of the universe encompassing nearly every one of the very recently estimated two trillion galaxies in the observable universe that is the theorized cosmic web and if it exists it is without a doubt the largest structure in the entire universe it's difficult to feel more insignificant yet at the same time a part of something immense when thinking of a structure so inconceivably vast number one and the number one largest thing in the universe is okay I know I practically invited this but it wasn't a request look at this please if you plan on commenting something similar to the structure of this joke at the very least make it slightly original alright now that we've gotten our jollies out of the way let's tackle something truly mind meltingly incomprehensible the largest thing in the universe is space [Music] nope no wait it's not a joke this time the furthest distance we can peer into space is about forty six point five billion light-years in any direction making what we call the observable universe about 93 billion light years in diameter that distance acts as our cosmic horizon the farthest we can currently see out into the stars though we don't actually know how big the universe really is our universe is currently expanding at a rate of around 22 kilometers per second per million light years a unit we call the Hubble constant even though it's not actually constant space the very material that makes up our universe is expanding and remarkably accelerating every second as it does space or more accurately spacetime can be thought of as a giant fabric with infinite layers on which all matter and particles exist the fastest something can move upon the fabric is what we refer to as the speed of light but the fabric itself can expand faster than that in every direction it's not that distant galaxies are or will be traveling away from us faster than the speed of light it's the sum of the space between us that is expanding faster than the speed of light and accelerating as time goes on this also means that as time goes on we will see less of our universe because the light that allows us to see distant galaxies will no longer reach us eventually the only sight any life in the universe will see besides the light of their own galaxy will be a vast and infinite darkness however that eventualities will take several billion years to be realized so all the better that we get out there and start exploring as soon as we can I could honestly spend several more minutes going over this subject but this video is already the longest we have ever made and I've simply run out of synonyms for big if you'd like more info on this subject check out any or all of these videos they are great you know some people hearing the news about a colossally sized universe that expands more quickly every day would have an existential crisis yet others instead turn to comedy to cope and make a joke about the size of their genitals or relatives in comparison to the size of the universe albeit usually on original humans truly are magnificent creatures let's hope we can spread that Majesty to distant stars soon enough as always be sure to check the description for sources till next video bon voyage [Music] please put all this in the bin how many portions are you putting in there how much is in the feed [Music]

Channel: Duo Fish

Views: 72,089

Keywords: Top 15, Top 10, Largest Things in Space, Biggest Things in Space, Largest Things in the Universe, Biggest Things in the Universe, Astronomy, 1-Ceres, Utopia Basin, Ganymede, ROXs 42Bb, UY Scuti, S5 0014+81, NGC 604, Newfound Blob, IC 1101, Horologium Supercluster, Giant Void, KBC Void, Great GRB Wall, Hercules Corona-Borealis Great Wall, Huge-LQG, Cosmic Web, Space, Duo Fish 15s

Id: O-XdlyWorLk

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017