The Biggest Things in the Universe!

when looking up at the night sky it's easy to wonder what's out there in the enormous universe that we but a tiny part of it's no secret that we are unbelievably small incomprehensibly small evidenced by the fact that there are so many supermassive things we do not yet know the full sizes of including our own universe but does size actually end well theoretically it should but new discoveries made every day challenge that theory size is something that doesn't seem to listen to the rules from physical bodies to structures to galaxies to clusters gravity is the amazing thing that seems to be binding these things into larger and larger phenomena the question is what is the biggest thing we've ever discovered and how big it is it well those will be looking at today as we journey up the ink ever-increasing ladder of size to determine the biggest things in the universe obviously when thinking size the go to one is planets but we'll get to that first off we have to look at the sub classification a dwarf planet there was a lot of controversy when Pluto was Declassified as a planet by scientists and instead was put to dwarf planetary status mainly because dwarf planet may as well just be a fancy name for very large asteroid in some respects with a diameter of just over two thousand kilometers Pluto is the largest dwarf planet we've ever discovered but what's the largest large asteroid well there are probably many millions of larger ones out there but the largest we've ever discovered is Ceres a neighbor to us within our own solar system and the nearest minor planet to the Sun discovered in 1801 Ceres is the 33rd largest body within the solar system and is the largest minor planet for those of you who don't know minor planet is kind of the next classification down after dwarf planet it just essentially means large asteroid its diameter is about 950 kilometers to put that in some kind of a perspective the United Kingdom has a total top-to-bottom length of about 1,400 kilometers so Ceres could theoretically be placed on countries like the US Russia has some landlocked countries in Africa with ease and this is the largest minor planet suddenly it gets a little easier to understand why not all celestial bodies are considered as planets as such I'm gonna skip over moons as a subcategory here long story short dairymaid of Jupiter is the largest moon we have discovered and it's twice the size of Pluto that along with many other moons we've discovered are all large Plato ganymede itself is about two times as large these are all quite small but series has some amazing possibilities for new life discoveries in the solar system but that's for another video okay enough about dwarf planets and moons let's talk about the real deal now planets come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and makeups with two to three trillion planets estimated our galaxy alone accounting for all the planets would be a near impossible task however we do know that once a planet exceeds a certain theoretical size it becomes a star so we have this to work with men making our calculations it takes about 80 times as much mass as Jupiter the largest planet in our solar system to begin the starlike process with hydrogen burning obviously you won't find any planets 80 times larger than Jupiter as atoms inside large planets begin to compress at a certain level making more massive planets not scale in size proportionally with scientific factors considered we believe that the theoretical size limit of a planet is around twice or three times as big as Jupiter enter GQ loopy be discovered in 2005 it orbits the star GQ loopy in the constellation of lupus around 500 light years away given these planets are so small next their stars is so far away we use infrared techniques to identify them and it's not 100% confirmed that this isn't a brown dwarf or failed star as Sun called them but it could well just fall behind the line that splits the largest gas giants from fusion capable failed stars it is about two-and-a-half times bigger than Jupiter but could be several times or more massive we don't really know it's a bit of a guessing game but that's just the beginning planets are underwhelming when it comes to size in a big enormous leap we are moving from planets to stars the other side of the cutoff point between gas giant and brown dwarf even GQ loopy B is dwarf next to our own Sun but our Sun is dwarf next to much larger red giants to supergiant's the largest stars could be covered in their own video but if we head up to the very top of the range we have uy scuti an absolute beast UO Scottie is a red supergiant in the constellation of scutum about five thousand light-years away from Earth it was first cataloged in 1860 but it wasn't discovered to be the biggest star we know of until a few years ago this thing is huge like almost scarily huge looking at it straight on you wouldn't even be able to see the Sun next to it it almost numbs the mind as to how massive this thing is but for an easy bit of WTF measuring if you placed a uy scuti at the center of our solar system it would not only extend far enough out to swallow the earth but it would completely engulf everything all the way out to Saturn at just under three billion kilometers in diameter it's so enormous that if you were traveling around the surface at the speed of light it would take you a full seven hours to circle it once compare that to the fact that light could circle our planet seven times in under a second and it would take just fourteen point five seconds to circle the Sun the numbers don't really do the size of this thing justice but as with anything in space it keeps going we theorized that stars could realistically get bigger and uy scuti is merely in our own galaxy imagine what's out there is some of the bigger ones but there's something bigger as always something that exceeds the size of a star and does it pretty frightening ly enter black holes black holes are a scary part of astrophysics not least because of the extremely volatile and hostile manner at which they form or the creepy imagery associated with them in fact one of the scariest things about black holes is the sheer size they can seemingly grow too we know that supermassive engine black holes are the gravity wells binding most galaxies together and these can reach scary big when thinking about size but the biggest black hole we know of is in fact a theoretical one located near the galactic North Pole tío n6 1 8 2 a very distant and super bright and radio-loud quasars discovered in 1957 but a radio survey in bologna has since indicated that a faint vibrant glow was a quasar the thing is the light being emitted from this quasar is incredibly bright but it's also estimated to be almost 10 and a half billion years old this thing is shining from deep within the visible universe this thing shines with an absolute visual magnitude of minus 30 point 7 as brightly as 140 trillion Suns this makes it one of the brightest objects in the universe that we know of it is thought that T on6 1/8 is the accretion disk of extremely hot gases swirling around an engine black hole in the center of a galaxy we can't even see this galaxy because the quasar outshines but to shine so brightly from so far away gravity suggests that the culprit black hole behind the quasar may weigh up to 66 billion solar masses so that's 66 billion times heavier than the Sun this is so massive that is no longer classifiable as a supermassive black hole instead being named an ultra massive one with a few more calculations thereafter we can determine that the Schwarzschild radius of this projected black hole was a massive 1,300 astronomical units so 1,300 times the distance between Earth and the Sun or just a massive expanse of black all-consuming solar abyss black holes can be scary but size-wise they pale in comparison to the next level up in size a nebula a nebula is a giant cloud of various dust and gases in space emitted by the supernova of a dying star quite spookily they are almost like the ghosts of stars that once were taking on some absolutely marvelous formations but they can also be gigantic the average size for interstellar nebulae ranges between one astronomical unit and ten but some could get much larger this is where we go above the boundary of a Lightyear in diameter some nebulae cover multiple sometimes even dozens of light-years going up to the very largest nebula we have the tarantula nebula aka 30 Doradus aka NGC 2070 based on its star cluster is located within the Large Magellanic Cloud a small dwarf galaxy at the edge of our Milky Way it is the most active starburst region of the local group of galaxies and covers about 1,800 lightyears this isn't just bigger than the largest black hole ever discovered it's billions of times bigger it's so big that if it were in the Milky Way in the same position as the Orion Nebula it would cost little shadows on earth a scary thought to be sure but it would make for some pretty cool nighttime viewing from dwarf galaxies to supermassive ones now as we stars the range in scales between the largest and smallest galaxies is mind-bending it seems like we're jumping the gun a lot undercutting the vast majority of incredible galaxies in favour of the largest known one but this thing is truly remarkable it is ic1 1:01 a super giant elliptical galaxy approximately a billion light years from Earth from telescope images this thing absolutely outshines its neighboring galaxies in its cluster elliptical galaxies are generally the largest kinds of galaxies as well as the oldest and I see one one zero one is no exception estimated to be over six million light years across with potentially around 100 trillion stars contained within this thing is not just a beast it's the Beast if it were put at the center of the local group with us it would swallow up their drama the galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud and more like most of these other elliptical galaxies I see one one zero one owes its size to galactic collisions across billions of years but it isn't actually creating any of its own new stars as it moves into the twilight stages of its life given that the size of engine black holes correlates directly to the size of a galaxy I see one one zero ones central black hole was at one point in time thought to be the largest black hole in the known universe however our frontier when six one eight has challenged this but still every component of this galaxy is nothing short of Awesome even though it may start declining in star numbers with a hundred trillion stars within you have to wonder what might be going on within that galaxy right now from galaxies to galaxy clusters size is still increasing on our list but this is where it becomes a bit less objectified and we start to spread into more patterns of things and loose groupings probably the most spectacular of the lot would be galaxy clusters these are the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the universe with the exception of the recently discovered galaxies filament we sit nice and cosily in the Laniakea super cluster Leni Kiara meaning immeasurable Heaven in Hawaiian and I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong that contains about three to five hundred clusters of galaxies making it home to approximately a hundred thousand galaxies there are loads of other super clusters but the largest is the kalam super cluster its existence is still theoretical by some nature but it's estimated to span just shy of 1 billion light years across containing approximately half a million galaxies that's big but with the aforementioned galaxy filament discovery we must also consider the Pisces Cetus supercluster complex this is the largest known galaxy filament just telling off Calum and exceeding the billion light year dimension technically the linear super cluster is a member of the complex so just remember no matter how insignificant you feel you are part of the biggest galactic structure in the known universe so for restructure which is full to the brim of interstellar contents to one that has nothing let's talk about super voids now super voids are obviously something I've had great success with on the channel but with thats creepy stuff aside voids are quite common in space the universe is kind of like a sponge there's lots of clustering and then there are giant holes in the middle disputed only by the theory of even distribution of matter after the Big Bang however there are some voids that are far too big for explanation but this is where it gets slightly intangible by definition all avoid is is simply a less galaxies dense area of space so the expected numbers of galaxies dips in the region of a void we stereotypically picture a void to be completely empty devoid of all cosmic activity but by the textbook definition the largest known void in the universe is the KBC void a two billion light year expanse where the expected numbers of galaxies dip but here's the thing we are within the KBC void the void contains our local group and much of Delanie key a super cluster right now you are not only sitting in the biggest galaxy super cluster but the biggest void in the known universe pretty underwhelming right well I think so too so instead I'm going to highlight a much more interesting void it is the theoretical original super void now there is no guarantee that this void exists in fact depending on your stance on parallel universes you might even deny that this void exists but at present it's one of the best leads we have on the W Maps CMB cold spot anomaly an area of the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe where the temperature drops pretty consistently by about 70 microkelvin over an equivalent distance of anywhere between half a billion to one and a half billion light-years the awareness super void if real shares a very creepy similarity with the likes of the bharatas void in that it isn't just the less galaxies dense but it is comprised of hardly anything I think there's a lot of scientific hype building videos around the KB see void just because we happen to be inside it but voice like the irid and a super void are much more interesting an out of place the bootys void which is very real and has been confirmed is 330 million light years across and contains 60 galaxies where 10,000 would be expected lower bound guess the original super void could be about half a billion light years in dimension but the upper bound could be up to one and a half billion thinking that there is an area that size of emptiness is truly frightening and kind of sad really now we come to something very interesting not a structure but the theoretical limit which cosmic structures can no longer exceed this is due to the cosmological principle in very very basic terms the cosmological principle states that when viewed on a large enough scale the properties of the universe are the same for all observers in layman's terms the universe is pretty consistent in form of structure over its entire expanse stars galaxies clusters black holes dark matter etc or reasonably well distributed and following the same patterns of occurrence but combining this theory with things like the uniform distribution of matter theory and other things we believe to be effective cosmology physical structures should not be able to exceed the size limit of about 1.2 billion light years the arete and a super boyd could be an anomaly but then again we don't even know if they exists so apart from that that should be it right well in spite all of this size still increases enter the Sloan Great Wall sitting very smugly above the theoretical limit the Sloan great wall or sgw is sort of like a galaxy filament except is kind of like the next level up galaxy filaments are quite a new concept given we've only been able to observe such a vast amount of area for a short period of time the Pisces Cetus complex we discussed earlier is almost a compound cluster which is making up the filament but this wall is more like a compound filament the lines are pretty blurred while we still figure out where the line between supercluster filament and wall is drawn but regardless the Sloan great wall is enormous measuring a one point three eight billion light years across and approximately 1 billion light years from Earth the Sloan great wall covers one sixtieth of the diameter of the observable universe it contains several super clusters of galaxies and is currently the sixth largest known object in the observable universe scientists are still trying to piece together the nature of this thing in 2011 it was proposition that this monster is in fact just a coincidence and that three other slightly smaller cosmic structures just happened to be aligning at the point in time we exist to observe it given the waiting time for cosmic movement in the universe is usually billions of years we probably will never know whether this thing is a coincidence but it's still absolutely enormous and it challenges cosmology itself if authentic but not to worry as there's still plenty more to cover that is a lot less coincidental there are supposedly five cosmic structures larger than the Sloan Great Wall known to science and these are quasar groupings and gamma-ray bursts this is where things stop being structures and start being networks of unique events however they are not to be ignored Clow is Campuzano you 1.11 and the huge LQG are all quasar groups all spanning in excess of two billion light years however if we go up to the very top we have the giant gamma-ray burst ring first discovered in 2015 through a radio survey of gamma-ray bursts the giant GRB ring groups nine burst together in a formation spanning a whopping 5.6 billion light years across given only nine cosmic events over five billion light years is quite sparse and reaching many people don't consider the giant GRB ring a structure but it is because of the ring light nature of these bursts it seems more like a structure than chance alignment of cosmic events but you can quickly get yourself lost in sci-fi and fantastical theories over a seemingly random formation luckily however there's something a bit less reaching out there and so this leads us on to the biggest question what is the biggest thing in the known universe well it's another gamma-ray burst formation not a ring this time but another wall it is the Magnificent Hercules Corona borealis Great Wall discovered a year before the giant GRB ring the Hercules Great Wall is the first so-called structure ever to exceed wait for it 10 billion light years across whereas the GRB ring was a stretch to believe that there is any design behind it there is something off-putting ly significant about this superstructure the wall occurs across the second third and fourth Northern galactic quadrants of the sky and in this area the concentration of oddly similarly distance gamma-ray bursts increases unusually the entire wall consists of 19 bursts a concentration of gamma ray bursts this high is very unlikely but was put to the test by a team of Hungarian scientists who used comma Grove Smirnov tests to determine the probability of such a structure occurring out of chance they divided 283 gr B's into sets of 31 and used three different methods of testing to determine the probability of natural existence and the highest probability stated that there was only a 5.7 percent chance the such a structure could occur coincidentally other methods you suggested less than 1% chance of this happening so why is this significant well it's the fact that such a seemingly engineered distribution of births could be explained by star formation in some kind of ultra massive mega cluster as such a cluster would also have to be in excess of 10 billion light years making it the largest structure in the universe and then some chiefly this thing is almost the stuff of science fiction however it came into existence and at M billion light-years across it is by default the biggest mystery in the universe imma make a separate video on this giant soon is a very undiscussed mystery of astrophysics sighs never really seems to end a 10 billion light year mega-structure even if it is the largest cosmological structure ever recorded pales in comparison to the size of the universe due to a number of factors that make lessels for no sense the diameter of the known observable universe exceeds that of its age the observable universe is estimated to be about 93 billion light years across door think even the Hercules Corona wall but even then size still doesn't end there are theories that suggest that you universe outside of what we can observe beyond the cosmic horizon could be anywhere between three times to 250 times larger than the universe we have observed for centuries size is one of the only things you can be sure of in this life it never ends and we're always on the verge of discovering the next largest thing who knows what future surveys will uncover over the next few decades we are sure to learn more about our universe and perhaps something even bigger than the Hercules Corona borealis great wall is lurking and waiting for us in the dark so from an asteroid smaller than the U K lurking within Neptune's orbit to a planet twice as large as Saturn to a black hole as large as our solar system two galaxies galaxy clusters clusters of clusters cluster filaments great walls right the way up to the universe itself size really is never-ending so next time you take life too seriously just think about the Hercules Corona great wall and think again and with that thank you so much for watching and always remember to reach for the stars [Music] you

Channel: SEA

Views: 428,369

Rating: 4.8550773 out of 5

Keywords: Sea 1997, Conspiracy Cases, Sea1997, Sea, 1997, Space, OOTW, Out of this world, astronomy, science, Biggest things, universe, biggest thing in the universe, light years, planet, star, uy scuti, biggest star, black hole, ton 618, biggest galaxy, ic 1101, tarantula nebula, supercluster, size comparison, universe size comparison, list, countdown, quasar, gamma ray burst, biggest, biggest thing in space, milky way, local group, solar system, supervoid, cold spot, void

Id: afwSzAkjT6c

Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/KingPickle]

No matter how many years I've spent thinking about it, it never ceases to impress me just how vast the universe is, and just how minuscule we are within it. It's humbling.

[u/Koreazei]

I always like to fantasize there is a planet out there full of giants and our planet is but a marble to them in comparison.