"Antarctic Wall" discovered

Three million years ago, mankind was born on earth, with continuous historical evolution, human civilization also has a few thousand years of history. In between these thousands of years, the period of rapid development of human science is these few centuries.

From the initial enjoyment of the mythical universe to the cognition of the celestial universe today, humans have a clearer and clearer orientation of our environment: the more we look up to the stars, the easier it is to find out how small humans are.

In the vast universe, there are too many unknowns. Until now, we do not know how big the universe is, and even how to define the boundaries of the solar system is still controversial.

Gradual realization of the universe

Once upon a time, we thought that "the sky was round" and that the sun was revolving around the earth. However, with the development of modern science, we gradually discovered that not only the relationship between the Earth and the Sun is reversed, but there are even seven planets that revolve around the Earth in the same way.

Such knowledge makes us gradually realize that the Earth is just a part of the solar system. However, after the discovery of the solar system, the broader universe was also discovered.

In the galaxy, there are hundreds of billions of sun-like stars, each with its celestial system like the sun. But this, too, is far from the limit of the universe.

Because in the universe, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies such as the Milky Way. Whenever we feel that our knowledge is getting closer to the truth, the universe gives us a hammer of reality.

In cosmology, the galaxies and their neighboring Magellanic Clouds and more than 50 other galaxies are called the Local Group, which in turn is contained within the Virgo Supercluster. But this is far from the end because the Virgo Supercluster is only a part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

What we think of as the universe is a combination of hundreds of billions of "galaxies", which may be a much smaller number of superclusters that do not exist in isolation, but rather encompass and contain them. This is why scientists have long believed that galaxies in the universe may not be randomly scattered throughout the universe, but rather clustered and linked, coming together in a cosmic network.

This belief was reinforced by the discovery of the "South Pole Wall".

The discovered "Antarctic Wall"

Although human spacecraft have not yet actually flown beyond the solar system, there has been some speculation about the extent of the universe and the perception of galaxies. Until now, the human observable and measurable radius of the universe has reached a unit of 46.5 billion light years.

Such a distance, which has long been an astronomical number for the Earth, may gradually become an obsolete smaller unit for the universe because of its expansion.

Although mankind has probed the boundaries of the universe so far, its calculations predate the "South Pole Wall", which is only one billion light-years away from Earth.

The "South Pole Wall" is so close to the Earth, why was it discovered so late? What exactly is it?

As its name suggests, the "Antarctic Wall" is a new cosmic structure discovered by scientists over the South Pole, with a diameter of 1.4 billion light-years and containing thousands of galaxies.

Such a huge cosmic structure, with the current level of humans, should be easy to be discovered. The reason why it was reported by foreign media so late is because of its special location.

Coincidentally, most of the "South Pole Wall" is located 500 million light-years behind the Milky Way, which is blocked by the light of the Milky Way. If this is the case, then why was the "South Pole Wall" finally discovered?

This is due to a means of predicting the movement of celestial bodies and their patterns - redshift. Redshift refers to the phenomenon that electromagnetic radiation reduces its frequency for some reason, which is manifested by the spectral lines of the spectrum moving toward the red end. And in the universe, it is expressed as the rate at which celestial bodies move away from the Earth due to cosmic expansion.

The redshift phenomenon was discovered by Hubble in the 1990s and has been widely used by astronomers in calculating the distances of celestial bodies.

It was this calculation that allowed them to calculate the existence of the "South Pole Wall" and its location at the southernmost point of our sky.

"The significance of the discovery of the Antarctic Wall

For astronomers, the discovery of the South Pole Wall is certainly of great significance. As mentioned above, they believe that the various bodies in the universe are connected, and the South Pole Wall seems to confirm this.

In the interior of the South Pole Wall, the different densities of matter cause them to be strung together in interstellar "filaments" like chains of hydrogen. The space between these "filaments" is so large that they seem to be separated by hundreds of millions of light years in the universe.

It is this phenomenon that makes astronomers call it a "wall", and these so-called "walls" together, can be called the cosmic network.

Some scientists have always believed that the cosmic network is like the nervous system of our brain, with points of interconnection between galaxies, and the "South Pole Wall" seems to play a role in connecting them. The new "filament" structure could help humans understand more about the components of the universe.

At the same time, it was discovered because the expansion of the universe was at work. The "Antarctic Wall", with its far apart "filaments", seems to indicate that perhaps they were once closer to each other. This would seem to indicate that as the universe expands, in addition to the objects in the universe moving away from each other, their structures are also moving away, but while moving away, these structures remain in place and continue to support the expanding universe.

As one of the largest cosmic structures discovered so far, we do not know the full extent of the "South Pole Wall" in the cosmic network. But as more and more cosmic structures are discovered, astronomers will have a fuller understanding of the universe's interior. Perhaps someday in the future, the full picture of the interior of the universe can be presented to us, and they are interlocked, together supporting the vastness of the universe.