I’m doing a bit of hobby writing and a detail I had in my story left me with a question I’m having difficulty answering. It’s nothing really existential or fundamental, but rather a silly question: exactly WHAT would 30 million galaxies look like? What I mean is:
In a photo like this, how much of this superstructure would be 30 million galaxies, with dwarf galaxies and anything galaxy-esc included? Would it look like one intersection of this structure? Multiple tendrils? Is this image even large enough to cover that many galaxies? I was hoping one of the astronomers here could help me with this very specific question.
The distribution of galaxies is locally arranged into clusters but on very large scales isotropic, so you could have a cluster of 30 million galaxies that are close together, for example.
Unlikely - gravity is strong enough at galactic scales to influence a galaxy’s shape, but not necessarily strong enough at intergalactic scales to influence galactic distribution to the same extent.
What would it look like as a movie? Current cosmology has the opening frames as a nearly completely homogeneous and featureless fog, and the current trajectory being gravitational pull along with the expansion of the universe leading to skinny beaded threads separated and isolated by ever enlarging voids.
It is, because I had that image as my wallpaper some years ago, The source in a legitimate science article doing a simulation of “Large Scale” structures in the universe.
Where did you get that image from? You can find lots of photographs of lots of distant galaxies from the Hubble telescope etc, and they look nothing like that.
