What is the Largest Thing in the Universe?

After you eat a family-sized bag of chips or an entire footlong from Subway, you might feel pretty big, but I’m here to tell you, thankfully, you’re nowhere near the size of some of the largest objects in our universe.

Mankind has built up some truly amazing things; the empire state building, the Sydney Opera House, the Three Gorges Dam, my faith that maybe the next Fast and Furious movie won’t suck. All true marvels of engineering and willpower, but even these massive feats pale in comparison to what the natural world can put together.

But the biggest of the big is yet to come. At approximately 10 billion light-years across it’s longest length, the Hercules-Corona (no relation) Borealis Great Wall, also known as the Great GRB wall, stretches across 10% of the observable universe. For comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy only spans some 100,000 light-years.

Discovered in 2013, the Great GRB Wall is a massive superstructure of gas, dust, and dark matter containing billions of galaxies and more than twice the size of the prior largest known object, the Huge-LQG [Large Quasar Group]. And the Great GRB is the biggest largest know structure in the galaxy!

Now you may be wondering if this great wall contains billions of galaxies, why does it count as one big thing, and not a bunch of smaller, but still massive things. By that logic couldn’t you just arbitrarily add more and more galaxies together to get an even bigger object?

Well, you’re not wrong, but what makes the Great GRB Wall unique is that this supercluster is home to a group of tightly packed gamma-ray burst sources in much higher abundance than we see in the normal background of space, and it’s separated spatially from everything around it, making the Hercules Corona Borealis Wall the biggest thing in existence.