Amazingly large but what is it?

Astronomers have found a mind-bogglingly large structure -- so big it takes light 10 billion years to traverse -- in a distant part of the universe. The discovery poses a conundrum to a fundamental tenet of modern cosmology, which posits that matter should appear to be distributed uniformly if viewed at a large enough scale. NEWS: Scientists Discover Universe's Largest Structure The newly found structure is more than double the size of the previous record-holder, a cluster of 73 quasars referred to as the Huge-LQG, or Large Quasar Group, which spans 4 billion light-years. The famous Sloan Great Wall is even dwarfed by the new structure, which is six times larger. Light travels at about 671 million miles per hour, or about 6 trillion miles per year. Scientists found the new structure by mapping the locations of gamma ray bursts. These fleeting, but high-energy outbursts are believed to be caused by exploding massive stars. “It’s a great tracer of where something was,” astronomer Jon Hakkila, with the College of Charleston in South Carolina, told Discovery News. PHOTOS: Hubble Logs Millionth Observation Because bigger stars form in areas with more material in general, gamma ray bursts can give astronomers a rough estimate of how much matter a particular region contains. “We’re treating each (gamma ray burst) source as if it’s a pin in the map and it’s sticking to something,” Hakkila said. After accounting for potential survey biases -- such as NASA's Swift telescope and other gamma ray trackers looking more often in one part of the sky or another -- scientists found a region roughly 10 billion light-years away in the direction of the constellations Hercules and Corona Borealis that had a disproportionate number of gamma ray bursts. Extrapolating from the locations of the bursts, scientists estimate the structure from which they came spans approximately 10 billion light-years in diameter. NEWS: Diving into the Vast Sloan Great Wall “This is probably a large concentration of galaxy clusters and other normal matter,” co-investigator Istvan Horvath, with the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary, wrote in an email to Discovery News. Additional monitoring of gamma ray bursts should provide more evidence for the structure’s existence. For now, Horvath says he has “no idea” how something that big could have evolved. The research appears in the online archive arXiv.org (arXiv:1311.1104 [astro-ph.CO]). http://news.discovery.com/space/galaxies/universes-largest-structure-is-a-cosmic-conundrum-131119.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1

The world never ceases to amaze.

Japan today announced the birth of a new baby island in the south of the nation’s territorial waters. An undersea eruption off the coast of Nishinoshima island broke the ocean’s surface waters yesterday, sending a plume of smoke and ash about 600 meters (2,000 feet) into the air and alerting the Japanese Coast Guard to the new island’s formation. PHOTOS: Pakistan’s New Island The cinder cone emerging from the ocean is suspected to be part of the same volcanic system that enlarged Nishinoshima in 1974 and has formed an islet on Nishinoshima’s southeast side that’s about 150 meters (about 500 feet) in diameter. The last time Nishinoshima showed any volcanic activity was in January 2000, when an eruption on the island’s northwest side discolored the water a pale yellow-green. “Japan’s top government spokesman joked that he hoped the outcrop would mark an expansion of Tokyo’s maritime territory — a reference to diplomatic rows with China and South Korea over ownership of other islands far from the tiny islet,” reported the AFP. “If this becomes a solid island, our country’s territorial waters will expand,” quipped Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. The most recent volcanically formed islands in Japan’s waters have remained uninhabited or have eroded back into the ocean. This one may do the same or continue to enlarge the size of Nishinoshima. IMAGE: A volcanic eruption in southern Japan gives birth to a new islet. (Japan Coast Guard) http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans/volcanic-eruption-births-new-japanese-island-131121.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1