Astronomers may have found the largest-scale structure in the known universe, which is a group of galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters that spans across roughly 1.3 billion light-years and contains a mind-boggling 200 quadrillion solar masses.
After an Incan system of counting and storing numbers using knots on cards, the newly found structure is dubbed Quipu, reported Space.com.
Made up of one long filament and multiple side filaments like a Quipu cord, the structure is complex.
Potentially making it the largest object in the universe in terms of length, it spans roughly 1.3 billion light-years (more than 13,000 times the length of the Milky Way), beating out previous record-holders such as the Laniākea supercluster.
On January 31, the discovery was shared in a new paper posted on the preprint website ArXiv.
"Quipu is actually a prominent structure readily noticeable by eye in a sky map of clusters in the target redshift range, without the help of a detection method," the team wrote in the paper.
Additionally, the research is part of a long-running effort to map the matter distribution of the universe at different wavelengths of light.
Quipu was the largest superstructure that the researchers discovered in their datasets, but they also found four more giant structures.
