A massive cosmic ring may challenge a key assumption abou...

What’s Happening

Let’s talk about 3 billion light-years across, the ring may challenge the “cosmological principle” that the universe looks uniform at sufficiently large scales.

News Cosmology A massive cosmic ring may challenge a key assumption about the universe The ring breaks the assumption that the universe looks uniform at large scales If it were visible to the naked eye, this is how a newly spotted giant ring of galaxies (yellow dots) surrounding a smaller ring (blue dots) would look in the night sky. Each dot corresponds to a distant quasar’s light filtering through diffuse matter around a galaxy. (plot twist fr)

Alexia Lopez, Roger Clowes, Stellarium Web Online Star Map By Lisa Grossman 18 hours ago this: via email (Opens in new window) Email Click to on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Click to on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Click to on X (Opens in new window) X Click to print (Opens in new window) Print PHOENIX — An abnormally huge cosmic structure has put a ring on it — and that bling might threaten a fundamental assumption of cosmology.

The Details

A ring of dense matter spans more than 3. 3 billion light-years , cosmologist Alexia Lopez reported January 6 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

If real, the structure could pose a problem for the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe looks the same in all directions on large scales. For our We summarize the week’s scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

Why This Matters

That principle is “the second most fundamental assumption in the field,” after Einstein’s theory of general relativity, says mathematical physicist Eoin ÓColgáin of Atlantic Technological University in Ireland, who studies challenges to the cosmological principle but was not involved in the new work. Every theoretical model of the universe assumes that matter is evenly distributed when you look at large enough volumes of space. Without that assumption, ÓColgáin says, “all hell would break loose.

This could have implications for future research in this area.

The Bottom Line

Without that assumption, ÓColgáin says, “all hell would break loose. ” The giant ring joins a growing list of huge structures that shouldn’t exist if that assumption holds.

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