The Euclid telescope, just launched today, will be able to observe galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. Here’s the largest map I could find (1 billion light years) that includes the Milky Way, Laniakea, the Shapley supercluster, the Perseus–Pisces supercluster, and the South Pole Wall.

https://irfu.cea.fr/Projets/COAST/southpolewall-graphics.html

  • admiralteal@kbin.social
    23·
    1 year ago

    Oof, I have bad, or maybe good, news for you: this isn’t the universe. This is just the local structure of galactic superclusters to us. Just a knot on one of the myriad galactic filaments. 1 Gly out of a 30 Tly (edit: that’s not right, closer to 100 GLy) and growing known universe. It’s real big, don’t get me wrong, but compared to the whole kit and kaboodle it’s a rounding error.

    SEA has a great video on The Great Attractor (and our local supercluster complex) that I recommend.

    For a bigger view, check out https://mapoftheuniverse.net/ , although necessarily this isn’t presented geometrically the way the one you linked is.

    The Wikipedia list of largest observed structures in the universe is also wild.

    • admiralteal@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      The reason it isn’t presented geometrically, by the way, is because over such upsettingly huge distances “geometry” loses some meaning. The current position of everything is more a view through time than actual space. So the map of the universe is much more like a timeline than an explorable map.

      At the scale of the map up top, a billion years more or less won’t make a huge difference, so it makes fair sense to present it that way. But once you’re up to 100 Gy and beyond… shit gets weird.