CfA2 Great Wall

Great Wall is in astronomy, the name of a cosmic structure consisting of a dense arrangement of galaxies relative to the surrounding space, in the form of a so-called filament. It makes - after U1.27 and the Sloan Great Wall - the third largest known continuous structure in the universe. The center of the Great Wall is the Coma supercluster.

This structure is the boundary of voids and was discovered in 1989 by Margaret Geller and John Huchra through lengthy, systematic By measuring the red shift of spectral lines. It lies 200 million light -years away in the constellation Virgo, 500 million light years long - roughly parallel to the northern edge of the galactic disk of the Milky Way - only 15 million light years thick and at least 300 million light years high. The amount may possibly be even greater, but the view is limited by the extinction of the Milky Way to the south. The Sloan Great Wall is in contrast, almost three times the size with about 1.4 billion light years in length.

Inside the Great Wall, the galaxy cluster Abell 2151 are (Hercules Cluster of Galaxies ), 1656 ( Coma cluster ) and 1367 ( Leo cluster of galaxies ). She moves like the Virgo Supercluster, to which our Local Group belongs, with about 600 km / s towards Hydra- Centaurus Supercluster, and all move together at a similar rate in 1990 discovered the Great Attractor in 200 million Lj distance, in the direction of the Norma cluster of galaxies in the constellation square, south of Scorpio.

The gravity of the normal ( baryonic ) matter would be too weak to explain the formation of such large structures. But the involvement of the dark matter, which forms after the Lambda -CDM model, the standard model of cosmology, about 80 % of the total matter, there is a good agreement with theory. Computer simulations of structure formation result in similar large-scale structures such as the Great Wall.