A 1.3bn light year-sized ring discovered by PhD student in Lancashire appears to defy the cosmological principle assumption

Astronomers have discovered a ring-shaped cosmic megastructure, the proportions of which challenge existing theories of the universe.

The so-called Big Ring has a diameter of about 1.3bn light years, making it among the largest structures ever observed. At more than 9bn light years from Earth, it is too faint to see directly, but its diameter on the night sky would be equivalent to 15 full moons.

The observations, presented on Thursday at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans, are significant because the size of the Big Ring appears to defy a fundamental assumption in cosmology called the cosmological principle. This states that above a certain spatial scale, the universe is homogeneous and looks identical in every direction.

“From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible,” said Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire, who led the analysis. “We could expect maybe one exceedingly large structure in all our observable universe.”

  • @derphurr@lemmy.world
    10•1 year ago

    Weird reporting like this is “new” GRB ring out of Swift and Sloan SDSS data.

    Sloan Great Wall, which is around 1.5 billion light-years in length

    South Pole Wall, which stretches 1.4 billion light-years across.

    Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which is about 10 billion light-years wide

    2015 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_GRB_Ring

    It is approximately 9.1 billion light years from Earth and about 5.6 billion light years across.

    2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv1421

    Evidence suggests that this feature is the projection of a shell on to the plane of the sky. Voids and string-like formations are common outcomes of large-scale structure. However, these structures have maximum sizes of 150 Mpc, which are an order of magnitude smaller than the observed GRB ring diameter. Evidence in support of the shell interpretation requires that temporal information of the transient GRBs be included in the analysis. This ring-shaped feature is large enough to contradict the CP. The physical mechanism responsible for causing it is unknown.