Newly found cosmic megastructure questions established understanding of universe
text_fields
In a ground-breaking finding, astronomers have uncovered a colossal ring-shaped cosmic megastructure, challenging long-standing theories about the universe's uniformity. Dubbed the "Big Ring," this enigmatic structure boasts an astonishing diameter of approximately 1.3 billion light years, ranking among the largest observed celestial formations.
The findings, presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans, have left the scientific community questioning established cosmological principles.
Led by Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire, the study reveals that the Big Ring, positioned over 9 billion light-years from Earth, defies the cosmological principle, asserting that the universe remains homogeneous and identical on a certain spatial scale.
The unexpected size of the Big Ring challenges existing cosmological theories, with Lopez stating, "From current cosmological theories, we didn't think structures on this scale were possible."
The Big Ring shares its cosmic neighbourhood with another colossal structure, the Giant Arc, discovered by Lopez in 2021. Both structures, exceeding the theoretical size limit of 1.2 billion light years, beckon the possibility of being interconnected components of an undiscovered cosmological system.
Despite being too faint to be seen directly, the Big Ring's diameter, equivalent to 15 full moons in the night sky, raises significant questions about the standard model of cosmology. Lopez suggests that these anomalies may signal the need for a re-evaluation of our understanding of the universe. "As a minimum, it's incomplete. As a maximum, we need a completely new theorem of cosmology," she asserts.
The discovery was made by analysing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), focusing on distant quasars. Bright enough to be visible from billions of light years away, quasars act as distant lamps, illuminating intervening galaxies that would otherwise go unnoticed. Statistical algorithms were employed to identify potential large-scale structures, leading to the revelation of the Big Ring.
The structure initially appeared as a near-perfect ring in the sky, but further analysis unveiled a coil-shaped configuration, resembling a corkscrew and aligned face-on with Earth. The mechanisms behind the formation of the Big Ring remain speculative, with possibilities including baryonic acoustic oscillations or the existence of cosmic strings—hypothetical defects in the fabric of the universe causing matter to clump along large-scale fault lines.