Sloan Great Wall

The Sloan Great Wall is a vast concentration of galaxy clusters and galaxies identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It is one of the largest known large-scale structures in the observable universe.

Galaxy cluster: A gravitationally bound collection of hundreds or thousands of galaxies, along with hot gas and dark matter. Clusters are the dense components whose concentration gives the wall its name.
J. Richard Gott III: An American astrophysicist whose research includes the topology and large-scale structure of the universe. Gott and collaborators reported the Sloan Great Wall in 2003.
Coma Supercluster: A nearby concentration of galaxy clusters that includes the Coma Cluster and lies within the CfA Great Wall. It anchors comparisons between known galaxy concentrations and the Sloan structure.
Homogeneity and isotropy: The cosmological principle that the universe is statistically uniform and directionally similar on sufficiently large scales. Very large structures prompt tests of how quickly cosmic matter distribution becomes statistically uniform.
Galaxy supercluster: A large association of galaxy groups and clusters that may not be gravitationally bound as a whole. The Sloan Great Wall belongs to the wider scale of clustered cosmic structure.
Sloan Great Wall discovery: The 2003 identification of an exceptionally extensive concentration of galaxies in Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. This discovery established the structure as a named cosmic feature.
Observable universe: The region of the universe from which light has had time to reach Earth since the Big Bang. The wall’s dimensions are judged within the finite region astronomers can observe.
Gravitationally bound system: A collection of matter held together against expansion or dispersal by its mutual gravity. The wall’s vast dimensions do not imply that it forms one bound object.
Cosmic web: The universe’s large-scale arrangement of filaments, sheets, and voids traced by galaxies and dark matter. The wall is a prominent concentration within the cosmic web.
CfA2 Great Wall: A vast galaxy concentration identified in the Center for Astrophysics Redshift Survey in 1989. It was an earlier, widely discussed wall-scale structure, identified with a different survey.

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