• Question: What is the biggest thing in existence that is currently known to us?

    Asked by anon-187172 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: David Ho

      David Ho answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Does the universe count? We know that it exists, and it contains everything we know of! Otherwise maybe something from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cosmic_structures.

      Looking at it the biggest thing on there is about 10,000,000,000 light-years across! Though it looks like we aren’t entirely sure what it is…

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      David is right, the universe is the biggest thing we know of. A lot of the objects on the list David provides are things are can ‘see’ in different wavelengths but don’t appear to be ‘objects’ as such. They might be from some explosive event that threw off radiation, which has spread and we see this radiation.

      The largest structures that are bound by gravity are galaxy clusters, or just galaxies themselves. If you want to know the largest ‘object’ it is probably a supermassive black hole in the middle of galaxies or a giant star which is 2600 times the radius of our Sun.

    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      I’m going to say “the universe”.

      We don’t know how big the universe is – it could be infinite in size. The bit we can see is 93 billion light years across.

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