‘Largest structure in the universe’ undermines fundamental cosmic principles

[Buster's Uncle]

‘Largest structure in the universe’ undermines fundamental cosmic principles
Digital Trends
Dyllan Furness  August 16, 2016



largest structure in universe discovered grb  NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones



Just in time for the hype surrounding No Man’s Sky, the game that takes cosmic scale to the extreme, a team of astronomers say they’ve discovered what might be the largest structure in the observable universe. The tremendous feature consists of nine gamma-ray bursts (GRB), forming a ring that is streaking across some 5 billion light years through space, according to a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The ring’s diameter stretches more than 70 times that of the full moon as seen from Earth. And, as the GRBs each appear to be about 7 billion light years away, the probability that these features are positioned in this way by chance is just one in 20,000, according to lead author Professor Lajos Balazs from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest.



Image of the massive feature as a distribution of gamma-ray bursts (blue dots).  L. Balazs


However, there are reasons to step back and reconsider the discovery — it seems to undermine our established understanding of how the universe developed.

According to the cosmological principle, the structure of the universe is uniform at its largest scale and its largest structures are theoretically limited to 1.2 billion light years across. This new discovery pushes that limit nearly five-fold.

“If the ring represents a real spatial structure, then it has to be seen nearly face-on because of the small variations of GRB distances around the object’s centre,” Balazs said in a press release from the Royal Astronomical Society. “The ring could though instead be a projection of a sphere, where the GRBs all occurred within a 250 million year period, a short timescale compared with the age of the universe.”

Balazs and his team used telescopes in space and observatories on Earth to identify the structure. They will now investigate whether the cosmological principle and other processes of galaxy formation can account for the ring structure. If not, theories about the formation of the cosmos may need to be rewritten.

“If we are right,” he adds, “this structure contradicts the current models of the universe. It was a huge surprise to find something this big – and we still don’t quite understand how it came to exist at all.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/largest-structure-universe-undermines-fundamental-131309834.html?nhp=1