The Sloan Great Wall is a colossal cosmic structure composed of galaxy filaments, clusters, and superclusters, identified through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Stretching over approximately 1.37 billion light-years, it is one of the largest known structures in the observable universe, far exceeding the size of typical superclusters.
This immense wall is part of the cosmic web, forming a dense filamentary network of galaxies that connects massive clusters and superclusters while surrounding large cosmic voids. Its discovery provided striking evidence of the non-uniform, web-like distribution of matter on the largest scales. The Sloan Great Wall illustrates how gravity has organized matter into hierarchical structures, with clusters forming nodes connected by long filaments of galaxies.
Studying the Sloan Great Wall helps astronomers understand the formation and evolution of large-scale structures, the influence of dark matter and dark energy on cosmic expansion, and the constraints these enormous formations place on cosmological models. It also provides a benchmark for simulations of the universe’s growth, testing whether current theories can reproduce structures of such scale.
In essence, the Sloan Great Wall is a massive, interconnected network of galaxies, one of the universe’s largest known structures, highlighting the vast, filamentary architecture of the cosmic web.