Holy Shit! Run Away!

With the Large Hadron Collider set to be mothballed for the better part of the next two years, our Planetary Threat Detection Editor has turned his (or her - we can't reveal the identity of this person, lest any of various nefarious actors try to do him or her harm) attention to more pressing matters.

While the LHC seeks to rip the fabric of the universe apart beginning with the smallest of particles, the newest impending doommaker hurtles towards us on a far different scale. According to The Atlantic, it's The Largest Structure Ever Observed in the Universe.

Colloquially known as Huge-LQG (for large quasar group - seriously, apocalyptic science types, we're gonna need to get better at naming things. Maybe you ask us for help next time? Doofus Overlord, I think, would make for an awesome end of times moniker - perhaps for a sentient comet, or frozen fog cloud.), the 73-quasar array is 1.6 - 4 billion light years across. (The Milky Way, as a comparable, spans a distance of only 100,000 light years.

According to the scientists that found Huge-LQG, led by Roger G. Clowes at the University of Central Lancashire, its very existence throws into doubt one of Albert Einstein's theories. As explained by astronomer William Keel,

[Einstein's] cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the Universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the Universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.

Roger Clowes is smarter than Einstein

So, if we're to believe this Keel fellow - and I've got reasons to believe he's a quack - the Universe is not actually knowable, and it's not, in fact, playing fair with scientists. It's the Lance Armstrong of cosmological entities. In essence, the existence of of Huge-LQG means that we don't know anything about anything. Up is down, conservative is liberal, Joe Flacco outplayed Tom Brady, the President mentioned Stonewall in his inauguration speech, all hell is breaking loose.

The Huge-LQG is 9 billion light years from Earth, so the images seen above represent activity from 9 billion years ago. Which means that we have no idea where this behemoth actually right now, which further means HOLY SHIT DON'T TURN AROUND!