It used to be that the Huge-LQG (“Large Quasar Group”) was the largest recognizable structure. A group of 73 quasars, it’s about 4 BILLION light years across. And now, it’s been topped.

The new champ is the evocatively named  Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. Discovered by observing and correlating gamma ray bursts, this structure is a galaxy filament, or a string of galaxies that are gravitationally connected. This new structure is 2 to 3 gigaparsecs (6.5 to 9.8 BILLION lightyears) long, and sits about 10 billion lightyears away.

The report is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1104

A news article on it here:

Universe’s Largest Structure is a Cosmic Conundrum

I’ve read through the paper, and the data backing up this discovery seems a bit preliminary… the structure, if I’m reading this right, seems to be defined by only a few hundred gamma ray bursts defining points *way* out there in deep space. When I think of a structure pushing ten gigalightyears in length, I envision a truly vast* string of galaxies. Well, maybe that’s what’s out there, just too faint to be picked up by telescopes just yet.

The universe is fricken’ *awesome.*