BOSS Great Wall size and scale context

The BOSS Great Wall is an enormous complex of connected superclusters in the distant universe. Spanning about 1 billion light-years, it is one of the largest large-scale structures ever identified, showing how galaxies can gather into immense walls and filaments rather than being spread evenly through space. Read its scale context, comparisons, and journey links on the canonical object page.

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Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.

About

Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.

Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.

Editorial

Solar System Planets From Electron to Atoms Stars To Scale Birth And Death Of Stars Black Holes To Scale

Views

Planets of the Solar System Stars of the Universe Black holes Subatomic scale

Open Scale of Space

Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.

About

Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.

Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.

Editorial

Solar System Planets From Electron to Atoms Stars To Scale Birth And Death Of Stars Black Holes To Scale

Views

Planets of the Solar System Stars of the Universe Black holes Subatomic scale

Open Scale of Space

Galaxy superclusters

Laniakea Supercluster

Laniakea is the immense supercluster region that includes the Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, and the Great Attractor. Its boundaries are defined less by a sharp visible edge than by the way galaxies flow through space, like matter draining into the same cosmic basin.

Scale fact500 million lyextent

Object class: Galaxy supercluster
Composition: ~100,000 galaxies, galaxy groups and clusters, hot intergalactic gas, dark matter

Large-scale structures

BOSS Great Wall

Scale fact1 billion lyextent

Object class: Supercluster complex
Composition: At least 830 visible galaxies, multiple superclusters, filaments, dark matter, intergalactic gas

Large-scale structures

Local superclusters region

This map shows the large-scale cosmic neighborhood within a radius of 500 million light-years around the Milky Way. Instead of a single object, it represents the nearby network of galaxy superclusters, filaments, and voids that make up our local portion of the cosmic web.

Scale fact1 billion lydiameter of mapped region

Object class: Large-scale cosmic neighborhood
Composition: Galaxy superclusters, filaments, voids, galaxies, dark matter, intergalactic gas