Newly-Discovered Space 'Megastructure' Prompts Cosmology Questions

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Facts

  • A PhD student at the UK's University of Central Lancashire, Alexia Lopez, has discovered the 'Big Ring,' a ring-shaped megastructure about 1.3B light-years in diameter and more than 9B light-years away from Earth. Lopez's discovery brings into doubt the cosmological principle, which states that the universe is homogenous above a certain spatial scale and appears identical across each direction.1
  • Both the Big Ring and 'Giant Arc' are found close to each other near the constellation Boötes, which means the two could be part of a larger, connected structure within the universe. To analyze the Big Ring, Lopez and her team used several statistical algorithms to reveal that while it looks like a perfect ring in the sky — the shape of a corkscrew when aligned to Earth's perspective.1
  • The Big Ring, which looks to be the size equivalent of 15 full moons in the night sky, violates the theory that though stars, planets, and galaxies are large collections of matter in our eyes, they are insignificant in the context of the whole universe and that bigger groupings of matter theoretically shouldn't form.2
  • The current consensus is based on the theory of gravitational instability, which states that the formation of large structures in the universe is limited to 1.2B lightyears in size, otherwise, they wouldn't have had enough time to develop. Lopez, who also discovered the 3.3B-light-year-in-diameter Giant Arc in 2021, said the data being analyzed is 'so far away that it has taken half the universe's life to get to us.'3
  • There have been other massive structures discovered, too, such as the 'Sloan Great Wall' at 1.5B light-years in diameter and the 'South Pole Wall' at 1.4B light-years. However, the largest ever found is the 'Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall,' which stretches approximately 10B light-years across.2
  • University of Warwick Professor Don Pollacco said, 'The likelihood of this occurring is vanishingly small,' adding that while more research needs to be done, some 'speculate that we are seeing a relic from the early universe where waves of high and low-density material are ‘frozen’ into extragalactic medium.'4

Sources: 1Guardian, 2BBC News, 3Sky News and 4Independent.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Big Think. Discovering unique phenomena in the universe shouldn't surprise us, as the so-called cosmological principle began to weaken decades ago with the observation of differing mass measurements and galaxy counts. While this still aligns with the Big Bang theory of an expanding universe, the difference now is that we know older, more distant galaxies are bluer, lower in mass, and less evolved in their shape. This discovery shows a whole new texture of the growing universe.
  • Narrative B, as provided by Medium. The Big Bang theory depends on the accuracy of the cosmological principle. While there may be some variation among galaxy clusters, particularly closer ones, observational studies — which is what these theories are based upon — show the overall patterns of distant matter are spread out uniformly throughout the universe. An important idea to consider is that differences in that irregular clumps of matter weren't made by the aftermath of the Big Bang, but actually by repeated nucleosynthesis from supernovas.

Predictions