“Since the most distant extent of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall is hard to verify, the most interesting finding is that the closest parts of it lie closer to us than had previously been identified,” Jon Hakkila of the University of Alabama in Huntsville told Space.com.

The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is part of a different supercluster called Laniakea, which, at 500 million light-years wide, is dwarfed by the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall. In fact, the team says the true extent of the latter structure is currently undetermined.

“Our gamma-ray burst sample is not large enough to place better upper limits on the maximum size of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall than we already have,” Hakkila said. “But it probably extends farther than the 10 billion light-years we had previously identified. It is larger than the size of most anything to which it might be compared.”