The Largest Object in the Universe (Besides Yer Mama)

On the back of the announcement of an extraordinarily massive black hole -- the largest ever found -- in the center of galaxy NGC 1277, the discovery of a large quasar group (LQG) that is 4 billion light years across was announced last week. To quote Space.com:

To put that mind-boggling size into perspective, the disk of the Milky Way galaxy — home of Earth's solar system — is about 100,000 light-years wide. And the Milky Way is separated from its nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, by about 2.5 million light-years.

The newly discovered LQC is so enormous, in fact, that theory predicts it shouldn't exist, researchers said. The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.

Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said.

As to the massive black hole in the center of NGC 1277, it is 17 billion times the mass of the Sun and it accounts for 14% of the total mass of NGC 1277. Normally black holes in the center of galaxies account for about .1% of their galaxy's mass.

Again, just wow.