A gigantic ring-shaped structure discovered in space
Viewed from Earth it is 1.3 billion light years in diameter and appears to be about 15 times larger than the Moon in the night sky
Scientists at the University of Central Lancashire have discovered a giant ring-shaped structure in space. Seen from Earth it is 1.3 billion light years in diameter and appears to be about 15 times larger than the Moon in the night sky.
Called the Great Ring by astronomers, it is made up of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
Since it's so big it challenges our understanding of the universe: it cannot be seen with the naked eye. That's really far away, and identifying all the galaxies that make up the larger structure took a lot of time and computing power.
Such large structures should not exist according to one of the guiding principles of astronomy, called the cosmological principle. This principle states that all matter is uniformly distributed in the Universe.
Although stars, planets and galaxies are enormous blobs of matter to our eyes, in the context of the size of the universe they are insignificant - and theory predicts that much larger blobs of matter do not form.
The Great Ring is by no means the first probable violation of the cosmological principle and therefore suggests that there is another factor at play, yet to be discovered.
The Great Ring was identified by Alexia Lopez, a PhD candidate at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), who also discovered the Giant Bow, a structure that extends 3.3 billion light-years into space.
"This is the seventh large structure discovered in the universe that contradicts the idea that the cosmos is uniform on the largest scales. If these structures are real, then it is certainly food for thought for cosmologists and accepted thinking about how the universe has evolved over time,”
she said.
When asked how it feels to have made these discoveries, the student responded:
“It's really surreal. I have to pinch myself, because I made these discoveries by accident, they were serendipitous discoveries. But it's one thing important and I can't believe I'm talking about it, I don't think it's me." “Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain within our current understanding of the universe,”
she added.
“And their size, their distinctive shapes and their cosmological proximity must surely tell us something important – but what exactly?”
Both the Great Ring and the Giant Bow appear relatively close together, near the constellation Bootes, also known as the Shepherd or the Herdsman.
Professor Don Pollacco, from the University of Warwick's physics department, said the probability of this occurring was extremely low, so the two objects could be linked and form an even larger structure.
So the question is: how do such large structures form?
It is incredibly difficult to conceive of a mechanism that could produce these structures, so the authors hypothesize that we are witnessing a relic of the early universe, in which waves of high- and low-density material are “frozen” in the extragalactic medium.
There are also similarly sized structures discovered by other cosmologists, such as the Sloan Great Wall, which is about 1.5 billion light-years long, and the South Pole Wall, which spans 1.4 billion light-years.
But the largest single entity that scientists have identified is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which is about 10 billion light-years across.
While the Great Ring appears as a near-perfect ring in the sky, Lopez's analysis suggests that it is more of a spiral shape, like a corkscrew, with its face aligned with the Earth.
"The Great Ring and the Giant Bow, both individually and together, offer us a great cosmological mystery for understanding the universe and its development".
The findings were presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in New Orleans.
