https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/11/gargantu ... s_home_top
The discovery of an unfathomably huge ring in the sky could change the way we think about the universe.
Scientists say the structure – which measures 1.3 billion light years in diameter, taking up a space in the night sky 15 times larger than the moon – is so big it theoretically shouldn’t exist.
Nicknamed the Big Ring, it was discovered by Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).
It’s the second time she’s found one of the immense formations in distant space, coming around three years after she spotted another named the Giant Arc which spans 3.3 billion light years.
She said: ‘Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe.
She continues ...
‘We expect matter to be evenly distributed everywhere in space when we view the universe on a large scale, so there should be no noticeable irregularities above a certain size.
‘Cosmologists calculate the current theoretical size limit of structures to be 1.2 billion light years, yet both of these structures are much larger – the Giant Arc is almost three times bigger and the Big Ring’s circumference is comparable to the Giant Arc’s length.
… snip …
‘So the question is how do you make such large structures?
I thought there might be a ray of hope here, until I read this ...
It’s incredibly hard to conceive of any mechanism that could produce these structures so instead the authors speculate that we are seeing a relic from the early universe where waves of high and low density material are “frozen” in to extragalactic medium.
... "waves of high and low density material are 'frozen' into the extragalactic medium?" LOL!
Another article on this discovery (
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67950749) quotes Dr Robert Massey, deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society, saying ...
"This is the seventh large structure discovered in the universe that contradicts the idea that the cosmos is smooth on the largest scales. If these structures are real, then it's definitely food for thought for cosmologists and the accepted thinking on how the universe has evolved over time," he said.
It also quotes Professor Don Pollacco, of the department of physics at the University of Warwick, saying that the "likelihood of" both the Big Ring and the Giant Arc being close together
"is vanishingly small so the the two objects might be related and form an even larger structure."
Making the problem bigger still!
But there might a solution in plasma cosmology. Ms Lopez's observation that it isn't a ring of galaxies, but a "corkscrew - with its face aligned with Earth", may be crucial to understanding how these structures formed. Because what natural process is there that makes corkscrews, folks? Too bad they apparently don't teach that in astrophysics curriculums any more.
Just saying ...
