2024-01-13 06:00:22
Scientists at the University of Central Lancashire in England discovered a gigantic ring-shaped structure in space.
Astronomers have called it the Great Ring and is made up of galaxies and galaxy clusters.
It has a diameter of 1,300,000,000 light years and appears to be 15 times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth in the night sky.
They say it is so big that questions our understanding of the universe.
It cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is really very far away and identifying all the galaxies that make up the entire structure has taken a huge amount of time and computational power.
Structures of that size should not exist, according to one of the main references of astronomy, called the cosmic principle. This states that all matter is evenly distributed throughout the universe.
Although from our perspective, stars, planets and galaxies look like immense agglomerations of matter, in the context of the size of the universe they are insignificant and, according to theory, larger groups of matter should not form.
The Great Ring is by no means the first violation of this cosmological principle, so it suggests that there is another factor at play, yet to be discovered.
According to Dr. Robert Massey, deputy director of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society, evidence is mounting for reevaluate what has been one of the central points of astronomy.
“This is the seventh large structure discovered in the universe that contradicts the idea that the cosmos is even at larger scales. “If these structures are real, then they are food for thought for cosmologists and for the accepted idea of how the universe evolved over time,” he said.
Chance discoveries
Photo: ECLAN
Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), has discovered two gigantic structures in space.
The Great Ring was identified by Alexia Lopez, a PhD student at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), who He also discovered the Great Archa structure spanning 3,300,000,000 light years of space.
Regarding how one feels having made these discoveries, he replied: “It is truly unreal. I have to pinch myself, because I made these discoveries by accident, were lucky discoveries. But it’s a big deal and I can’t believe I’m talking about this, I don’t think it’s me,” she said.
“Neither of these two ultralarge structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe,” he added.
“And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must necessarily be telling us something important, but what exactly?”
The Great Ring and the Great Arch appear to be relatively close to each other, in the proximity of the constellation Bootes or the Boyero. Photo: NASA
This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that galaxies are evenly distributed throughout the universe.
a great mystery
Professor Don Pollacco, from the Department of Physics at the University of Warkwick, in England, pointed out that the probability of this happening is tinyso it is possible that the two objects are related and part of an even larger structure.
“The question is, how do these large structures come to be formed?” he questioned.
“It is incredibly difficult to conceive of a mechanism that could produce these structures so instead the authors speculate that they are seeing a relic of the early universe where waves of high- and low-density material are ‘frozen’ in an extragalactic medium.”
There are other large structures discovered by other cosmologists, such as the Sloan Great Wall, a giant wall in the universe with a length of 1,500,000,000 light years, and the South Pole Wall, which extends 1,400,000,000 light years.
But the largest single entity ever discovered by scientists is the supercluster of galaxies called the Great Wall of Hercules-Corona Borealis, which has a length of about 10 billion light years.
Although the Great Ring has the appearance of an almost perfect circle in the sky, analyzes by Alexa López suggest that it has a shape more similar to a spiral, like a corkscrewwith its face aligned with the Earth.
“The Great Ring and the Great Arc, both individually and together, present us with a great mystery as we work to understand the universe and its development.”
The discoveries were presented during the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in New Orleans.
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