A supercluster of galaxies which is located in the direction of the Constellation Pisces has been identified by an Indian Astronomers team. The astronomers have named it as ‘Saraswati.’
“Saraswati is one of the largest known structures in the nearby universe and is at a distance of 4,000 million light years away from us,” the astronomers stated.
The discovery by the astronomers will be published in the forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society. The astronomers are from Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA,) Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) and members of two other Indian universities.
“We are very much surprised to spot this huge wall like supercluster of galaxies which is visible in a large spectroscopic survey of the distant galaxies and known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,” said a study lead author Joydeep Bagchi.
In the Cosmic Web, Superclusters are the largest coherent structures.
The Saraswati supercluster is predicted to expand over a scale of 600 million light years. It might even contain the equivalent of over 20 million billion suns.
The long popular ‘Cold dark matter’ model of the evolution of the universe had predicted that small structures like galaxies formed first, which gathered into large structures.
Most forms which are of this kind of a model will not predict the existence of large structures such as the ‘Saraswati supercluster’ within the current age of the universe.
The discovery of huge structures will make astronomers to re think famous theories of how the universe got its current form, said the astronomer.