Cosmic bigness.Astronomers have found the largest structures ever discovered in the universe--filaments actin filament one of the thin contractile myofilaments in a myofibril. intermediate filaments a class of cytoplasmic filaments that predominantly act as structural components of the cytoskeleton and also effect various movements in cellular processes. muscle filament myofilament. of galaxies 200 million light-years in length that date from just 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The filaments contain 30 giant pockets of gas, each of which maybe as much as 10 times the mass of the Milky Way. Such large structures were rare in the early universe and are probably the precursors of the type of galaxy clusters seen today, says Ryosuke Yamauchi of Tohoku University in Sendai Sendai (sĕndī`), city (1990 pop. 928,138), capital of Miyagi prefecture, N Honshu, Japan, on Inshinomaki Bay. A major industrial and commercial city, it has industries that manufacture chemicals, metal goods, wooden dolls, and silk yarn. Long an educational center, Sendai is the seat of Tohoku Univ., Japan. Yamauchi is part of a team that used the Subaru and Keck II telescopes atop Hawaii's Manna manna (măn`ə), in the Bible, edible substance provided by God for the people of Israel in the wilderness. In the Book of Exodus it is compared to coriander seed and described as fine, white, and flaky, with the taste of honey and wafer. In Christianity manna has been seen as prefiguring the Eucharist. Kea to study a patch of sky known to contain a high density of galaxies. Subaru images, combined with velocity measurements from Keck, revealed much fainter objects than had previously been discovered in the region. The pockets of gas, first discovered 6 years ago, are known as Lyman-alpha blobs. The Subaru observatory announced the findings on July 26. Theory suggests that the seeds of these large structures formed during the birth of the universe, comments John Peacock of the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh in Scotland. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion