China's Not The Only One With A Great Wall

A dive into the universe's largest structure, the supercluster of galaxies known as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained; what is man that You take thought of him, and the son of man that You care for him?” ~ Psalm 8:3-4 (NASB translation)

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

You probably know your address, right?

If someone asked you where you lived, you could rattle off your house number, street, city, state, country, etc…but that’s only your address on the Earth. Do you know your address relative to the entire universe?

That is your cosmic address—and as our technology keeps getting more advanced, it keeps getting longer.

We live on a little planet we call Earth. It orbits around a star—our Sun (or Sol if you want to go Latin and be fancy)—at the center of the Solar System…

…which is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, which belongs to the Local Group of galaxies, which is inside the Virgo Supercluster, which in turn is part of the Laniakea Supercluster. Beyond that, we haven’t mapped much farther, so we just say it’s in “the universe”.

Which, it turns out, is really big.

These “superclusters” are enourmous groupings of entire galaxies. And there are even structures beyond them—superclusters of superclusters!

Hard to picture, right?

And it gets better: we recently discovered that our own mega-supercluster, the Laniakea Supercluster, isn’t even the largest of such structures that we’ve found.

Back in 2013, a team of astronomers using gamma ray bursts (GRBs) discovered what’s now believed to be the largest structure in the known universe: the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. This enourmous cosmic structure—thought to be a filament of galaxies—was estimated to span 10 billion light-years in length, 7.2 billion in width, and nearly 1 billion thick.

(For context, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, and Laniakea is “only” 500 million light-years wide. So they’re not even close.)

And in April of 2024, that same team published a follow-up study suggesting it’s likely even larger than they thought the first time around. The sample size was too small to pin down exact measurements, but the findings strongly suggest the structure exceeds the earlier estimate—which, seeing as that was already astoundingly large, is pretty mindblowing.

So, wait—how do we find something so far away?

And so much bigger than we are?

Enter gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. When massive stars collapse or compact objects like neutron stars collide, these events release an intense beam of gamma radiation—light at the highest energy level.

Gamma rays.

These are the most luminous events in the universe and can outshine entire galaxies for a short period of time. And they’re useful for astronomers here on little ol’ Earth because they essentially act as cosmic lighthouses—beacons that let us study any and all of the stuff between us and them. By analyzing GRB light, scientists can learn both the distance to and composition of far-off galaxies.

But even more than that: mapping the locations of GRBs lets us trace where matter is densely populated. Regions with more GRBs point to regions with more galaxies, which helps astronomers map the large-scale structure of the universe—like galaxy clusters, superclusters, and these “Great Wall” formations.

And that has some interesting implications.

See, the Big Bang (and most other secular cosmology theories) rely on a key assumption called the cosmological principle—that the universe is homogenous and isotropic on large scales. In other words, it should look the same in every direction, and matter should be evenly distributed on cosmic scales.

(I go more in depth on that in one of my previous articles—if you missed it, you can find it here)

But these “Great Walls” challenge that idea. When one part of the sky contains galaxy structures 20 times larger than another, it doesn’t exactly scream “evenly distributed”, now does it?

So how much weight can we really put in a theory that depends on large-scale uniformity—when we keep finding signs of anything but?

God created the universe to be glorious and beautiful. And even now, thousands of years after its creation, we’re still discovering things that leave us stunned.

Things so vast, so far away, that we have only just now detected them. And we’ve been on this planet for ages!

God can see these things whenever He wants. But for us, in our tiny corner of the cosmos, He built in the joy of discovery. It’s like He hid little Easter eggs throughout creation—just waiting for us to find them.

He doesn’t need us to find them.

But He wants us to.

Because in every galaxy, every supercluster, every Great Wall of the universe—we see more of His majesty.

And honestly…where’s the fun in seeing everything all at once?

Our universe is stunning—and bigger than we could ever hope to grasp.

And I, for one, can’t wait to see how much bigger it can get.

—See you in the stars—