The BLOB For Freaky Friday...

Now, I'm not talking about the blob that was the star of a couple of sci-fi movies (one staring Steve McQueen), but an actual Blob out there in space.

Actually, almost anything out in Space could be the focus for Freaky Friday, but we'll stick with the Blob for today. We could never cover all the strange things in space in our short lifetime anyway!

The Newfound Blob

Photo credit: ESO/M. Hayes

In 2006, a mysterious blob was named the largest structure in the universe, although it quickly lost its title to newer discoveries. This blob is a giant mass of gas, dust, and galaxies that is 200 million light-years wide and looks like a cluster of green jellyfish. It was found by Japanese astronomers who had been studying a region of the universe known to have large concentrations of gas. To do this, they placed a special filter on their telescope, which coincidentally allowed them to pick up the presence of the blob.

Each of its three “arms” has galaxies packed four times denser than the universe’s average. The galaxies and the gas bubbles contained within the blob are called Lyman-alpha blobs. These are believed to have formed a mere two billion years after the big bang, just a blink of an eye in the cosmic timeline. Scientists think they formed when massive stars from the universe’s earliest days went supernova and blew out their surrounding gases. Because this structure is so large, the astronomers believe it is one of the very first to have formed. They theorize that in the distant future, even more galaxies will emerge from the gases contained in the blob.

I can't even wrap my head around anything that big. Way too much for my small mind to grasp, I'll tell ya!

Coffee out on the patio this morning, cause the rain never showed up!