Astronomers discover Quipu, the largest superstructure in the universe: “deserve special attention”

A team of astronomers has discovered the largest structure in the universe to date, naming it Quipu after an ancient Incan system of measurement. Remarkably, it contains 200 quadrillion solar masses and is roughly 1.3 billion light-years wide.

Solar masses are a unit of measurement used in astronomy to express the mass of other celestial objects in comparison to the mass of the Sun. One solar mass is equivalent to the mass of the Sun, which is approximately 1.989×10³⁰ kilograms. This unit is very useful for describing the mass of stars, galaxies, and other celestial bodies in a more comprehensible way. It gives us an idea of the immense scale of Quipu.

Quipu meaning in Andean culture

A quipu is an ancient recording device used by Andean civilizations, and particularly the Incas. It consists of a series of colored strings of various lengths, with knots tied in different positions. Quipus were used to keep accounts and record information such as censuses, tributes, and agricultural data.

The study of Quipu will help us understand how galaxies evolve, improve our cosmological models, and enhance the accuracy of cosmological measurements. The research has been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, with Hans Böhringer from the Max Planck Institute in Munich as the lead author.

Quipu is the largest structure, in terms of length, ever found in the universe. This, along with four other superstructures discovered by the researchers, contains 45% of galaxy clusters, 30% of galaxies, and 25% of matter, occupying 13% of the universe’s volume.

“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. These large structures leave their mark on cosmological observations,” the authors write.

Superstructures imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is residual radiation from the Big Bang and a key piece of evidence supporting it.

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