Astronomers called the "structure" the South Pole Wall.
Thick on one side
Our galaxy - the Milky Way - is fenced off. Astronomers from France, Israel and the United States reported this in a specialized Astrophysical Journal, which was referred to by the LiveScience portal, which briefly told about the discovery.
The South Pole Wall is the name of the discovered structure, which is a supercluster of galaxies.
The wall is curved. From the outskirts of the Milky Way to one of its edges - 500 million light years, to the other - 300 million. The wall bends around our galaxy, as if protecting it from something located in front of it, and stretches in a kind of semicircle for 1.37 billion light years. It's better not to even think about how many kilometers it is - there are 9 trillion of them in one light year.
There are even more authentic walls - for example, the Hercules – Corona Borealis Great Wall, which spans 9.7 billion light years. This is more than a tenth of the diameter of the visible universe. But that wall is far away, and close to the South Pole Wall. That leaves a chance to study it and try to understand the role of such an impressive object that has a tangible gravitational effect. Actually, this influence, which changes the speed of movement of galaxies, the Wall gave itself to astronomers, whose team was headed by Daniel Pomarède from the Institute for the Study of the Fundamental Laws of the Universe (Institut de Recherche sur les Lois Fondamentales de l'Univers). After all, from observers from Earth it is blocked by the arms of the Milky Way and clouds of dust.
Layout of the Wall.
Promotional video:
On the other hand, it's completely empty
If the Wall is located on one side of the Milky Way, then on the other - there is nothing at all. There Void, scientifically speaking. In other words, a hole, from edge to edge of which is a billion light years.
The hole was discovered several years ago by American astronomers Ben Hoscheit and Amy Barger of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. And thereby complemented the picture of those areas of the universe with which we are adjacent. Since the Milky Way does not exist in isolation, but as part of larger structures - galactic clusters and superclusters. Our galaxy, together with the galaxies closest to it - Andromeda, Triangle and every little thing, numbering about 50 - are included in the so-called Local Group. Ta is in the Virgo Supercluster, which has at least 100 local groups and 30 thousand galaxies. It, in turn, is pulled by the Great Attractor, aka the Great Center of Attraction, which is part of the endless Laniakea - a structure that includes more than 100 thousand galaxies.
The nearest environment of the Milky Way.
In general, the Universe - with its nodes-clusters and connections between them - is surprisingly similar to a neural network, which seems to be inside someone's infinitely large head.
The structure of the universe resembles a neural network.