Largest Object in the Universe Discovered

prostoalex writes "Quick, think of the largest object you can imagine. Whatever your imagination delivered it probably wasn't an 'enormous amoeba-like structure 200 light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas,' a newly found object, as USA Today reports."

Comments

This reminds me

[Klaidas]

An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.

This reminds me of an interesting thought I once heard in some movie, it was something like this:

It is possble that our universe is just a tiny piece of some huge creature's nail. If so, a small piece of our nails might be a universe too...

Re:This reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

But by the very nature of the supposition that this thing exist, it *is* bound by our rules... namely the speed of light limit, which appears to be fundamental to physics.

That said, it could simply work on a different timescale. It seems, though, that if the lifespan of your "particles" - galaxies - is of the same order as the time it takes light to cross your fingernail, you're pretty much screwed.

Re:This reminds me

[Anonymous Coward]

The existance of such ridiculously large macro organism is quite possible, we just need to scale up the time frame relatively to it size. Virus operates in second, insect in day, human in month, coporate in quarter, civilization in millennium, so on and so on.... Every organism is a collective of another simpler organism. Maybe the thing referred to as god is the ultimate organism.

By M.

Remember

[Eightyford]

Remember that was the largest known object in the universe millions and millions of years ago. Who knows what it would look like today.

Size 42

[Doc Ruby]

The largest object that I can imagine quickly is the Universe . It's taking longer to imagine the Multiverse as a single object, but it's even more fun.

The Wall?

[Zarhan]

How does this compare to The Great Wall, discovered as a structure in 1989?

What makes a 'single' structure

[lawpoop]

What is the criteria by which we call something a 'single' structure? If it's stuff bound by gravity, doesn't gravitational force equally attract everything in the universe? Do we consider stuff bound to itself by one of the other primary forces a single entity?

Why 'theoretical big bang' though?

[cruachan]

Interesting that it uses the line 'theoretical big bang' though. Am I being paranoid here or is USA Today covering itself against Creationists? Just seems rather odd to underline theoretical like that.

Re:Problem with pseudo-scientists

[MisterSquid]

Whose thinking ISN'T limited by what they know?

Everyone has limitations, but one of the beauties of the human mind is metacognition. The phenomenon of having expert knowledge prevent one from reinterpreting contrary data is referred to as "confirmation bias" which I recently read about in a blog post by Bob Sutton. Sutton is a fairly renowned consultant.

In the above post, he refers to a phrase that should be familiar to many geeks, which is "strong opinions, weakly held." This is a very good approach to the study of science. Know what you know with near certainty, but the second you come across contrary evidence be ready to let everything go.

Really, it's just the idea that no one, really, knows anything. All knowledge is contingent and what little we think we know is probably wrong somewhere.

Re:That's 200 Million, not 200 Light Years

[jc42]

Well, maybe. But there are a number of examples where it turns out to be very useful to treat a collection of physically disconnected objects as an object. The most common example in astronomy is probably a galaxy, which in many respects acts like a single, organized "object", despite the fact that it's actually trillions of separate objects loosely bound by gravity. And we usually treat our Solar System as an object (which contains four smaller objects of similar structure).

My favorite example is biological. We have no trouble viewing colonial organisms like a sponge or a coral head or a Portuguese Man-o-War as a single "object", even as a single "individual". But biologists have found that treating a hive of bees or ants (or any eusocial creatures) as a single "individual" helps greatly in understanding them. True, these individuals have a lot of physically disconnected bodies. But they are bound by effective communication systems, mostly chemical, partly visual and auditory, and they really do behave as a single colonial individual.

This mostly just illustrates that our definitions of "individual" and "object" might need a bit of work. And the best definition might vary somewhat depending on your field of study.

We know pretty well that treating the "Gaia" concept as a real individual is mostly just silly. But that's at the high extreme; a single animal such as a human certainly is an "individual" although we arose from what was originally a colonial collection of single-cell organisms 600 million years or so back. Somewhere in this continuum we find borderline cases like ants, bees, termites, and mole rats, which are borderline cases that confound our definitions.

But the universe doesn't have to file things according to our definitions. Rather, it's up to us to find concepts that work, and give them names that work.

It's likely that, for astronomers, it will turn out useful to treat this collection of galaxies and assorted other stuff as a gravitationally bound "object". Or maybe, like the recent discussion of the term "planet", astronomers might decide that this was a bad idea and will revise the terminoloy appropriately.

I think they'd have been better off calling it a "structure". But IANAA.