Giant Ring Of Galaxies Puzzles Astronomers
A colossal structure almost seven billion light years away is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved
In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter.
It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.
The Big Ring, as the structure has been named, could mean that we need to amend the standard model of cosmology.
The discovery, led by astronomer Alexia Lopez of the University of Central Lancashire, was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January, and is reported in a pre-print paper available at arXiv.
It’s the second giant structure discovered by Lopez and her colleagues. The first, called the Giant Arc, is actually in the same part of the sky, at the same distance away. When the arc’s discovery was announced in 2021, it puzzled astronomers. The Big Ring only deepens the mystery.
“Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe,” Lopez said in January. “And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important – but what exactly?”
The most immediate link seems to be with something called a Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO). These are giant, circular arrangements of galaxies found all throughout space. They’re actually spheres, the fossils of acoustic waves that propagated through the early Universe, and then froze when space became so diffuse acoustic waves could no longer travel.
The Big Ring is not a BAO. BAOs are all a fixed size of around 1 billion light-years in diameter. And thorough inspection of the Big Ring shows that it is more like a corkscrew shape that is aligned in such a way that it looks like a ring.
Which leaves the very unanswered question: What the heck is it? And what does it mean for the Cosmological Principle, which states that, in all directions, any given patch of space should look pretty much the same as all other patches of space?
“We expect matter to be evenly distributed everywhere in space when we view the universe on a large scale, so there should be no noticeable irregularities above a certain size,” Lopez explained.
“Cosmologists calculate the current theoretical size limit of structures to be 1.2 billion light-years, yet both of these structures are much larger – the Giant Arc is almost three times bigger and the Big Ring’s circumference is comparable to the Giant Arc’s length.”
But the size is just one of the problems. The other is what it means for cosmology, the study of the evolution of the Universe. The current model is the one that currently fits the best with what we observe, but there are some features that are challenging to explain under its framework.
There are other models that have been put forward to address these features. Under one such model, Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology, in which the Universe goes through endless Big Bang expansion cycles, ring structures are expected – although it’s worth noting that conformal cyclic cosmology has significant problems of its own.
Another possibility is that the structures are a type of topological defect in the fabric of space-time known as cosmic strings. These are thought to be like proton-wide wrinkles that emerged in the early Universe as space-time stretched, then froze into place.
We’ve not found much physical evidence of cosmic strings, but the theoretical evidence is pretty promising.
At the moment, nobody knows for sure what the Big Ring and the Giant Arc signify. They could just be chance arrangements of galaxies twirling across the sky, although the likelihood of that seems pretty small.
The best hope would be to find more such arrangements of galaxies, scattered throughout the Universe, hiding in plain sight.
“From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible,” Lopez said. “We could expect maybe one exceedingly large structure in all our observable Universe. Yet, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc are two huge structures and are even cosmological neighbors, which is extraordinarily fascinating.”
The research was presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society and is reported in a pre-print paper at arXiv.org.
See more here sciencealert.com
Header image: University of Central Lancashire
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Tom
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No science is ever settled. It’s fine to be baffled because that should lead to new understanding and discovery…except in medical science where being baffled is claimed as a reason to deny reality.
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Mario M
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Miles Mathis has given an answer
http://milesmathis.com/ring.pdf
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Herb Rose
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Hi Mario,
Why do positive and negative charges separate creating the radiated electric force? It is because energy is more strongly attracted to positive matter, displacing negative matter and creating the electric force between opposite charges. A neutron, not in a nucleus, will decay into a proton, electron, and gamma ray within ten minutes because the movement of the positive proton and negative electron through an energy field will create a sheering force between the two charges due to currents going in opposite directions (right hand rule). It is energy that creates the universe, not matter.
Herb
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VOWG
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Hmmmmm, how the universe evolved, I wonder how many million more years it will take for man to make a determination? What, you say we don’t have a million more years as our species and planet will be wiped out when the sun cools and earth can no longer support life.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi VOWG,
To understand what one reads one must first understand who wrote it. I read: “Michelle Starr is a Senior Journalist at ScienceAlert; her deep love and curiosity for the cosmos has made the publication a world leader in reporting ” And I know of no reason I should not believe she is NOT an astronomer. So when she writes “The most immediate link seems to be with something called a Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO). These are giant, circular arrangements of galaxies found all throughout space.”, she doesn’t realize she is exposing the nonsense of the astronomer community which getting so excited about these other recent observations.
For it seems to me that this community does not understand they are observing WHAT WAS and not WHAT IS. And I doubt these astronomers have read what Newton understood about elementary mathematics when he admitted he could not predict the position of the moon because of the influence of Jupiter’s gravity upon the moon after he had already considered the stronger influences of the Earth and Sun upon the moon’s motion. This after Newton had admitted his great knowledge was because he had stood upon the SHOULDERS of GIANTS.
Have a good day
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JaKo
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Hi Jerry,
Have you read the: “http://milesmathis.com/ring.pdf” liddle file?
It seems there’s more at play than these “scientists” have imagined. (Remember Albert’s quote about imagination?)
I do not think the “millions of years,” as VO suggested, makes any sense unless one considers very long time required to rectify the consequences of our fundamentally wrong concepts about science and discovery.
May all those “Giants” (you mentioned) sleep undisturbed, as the real world goes on regardless.
You too have a good day, Jerry, unless you have other plans,
Cheers, JaKo
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Jerry Krause
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Hi JaKo,
I read: “Miles Mathis (born 1964) is an American artist, poet, writer, pseudoscientist, and conspiracy theorist.
Newton and his Giants have a history of accomplishments which is why we have the internet. Newton was not a “pseudoscientist”
Have a good day
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Jerry Krause
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Hi JaKo,
Albert stated: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”.
Isaac stated: “A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the thing is false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.”
Albert stated “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.” Why? Because the individual involved has to BELIEVE something could be true. But in science reproducible observations (experiments) can prove an idea (opinion) to be ABSOLUTELY WRONG.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Have a good day
(Fixed your name spelling) SUNMOD
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JaKo
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Hi Jerry,
Really? You don’t want to know why “we have an internet” — I was there, you see. Nothing to do with your “giants'” accomplishments…
Cheers, JaKo
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Jerry Krause
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Hi JaKo,
Scientists are said to be curious. Were you born before 1941? Were you involved with the invention of radar which I have read about which saved the FREE WORLD? Were you involved in the design of the nuclear bombs which worked the first THREE times they were tested to END WWII?
Have a good day
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Howdy
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“It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.”
Defining the universe by the limited thinking of Man. These people will never learn.
““And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important – but what exactly?””
Isn’t it obvious? The universe and it’s secrets are beyond knowledge. Give in to the realization that Man is not the center of the whole cosmos, and his thinking is flawed in the extreme.
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JaKo
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I’m sorry Howdy,
I should have read your comment before I responded to Jerry. Me thinks yours is, if not more to the point, at least much more concise…
Cheers, JaKo
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DouweH
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Man will never understand the universe. To understand the universe you have to know and understand its’ creator. This will never happen in our lifetime.
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Herb Rose
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Light is a form of energy (a change n the amplitude of an energy field) and as such it will not disappear until being absorbed by matter. The light emitted from an object will go in all directions and the path of that light will change as the energy field it is in changes.
When a telescope collects and concentrates the light it contains images including multiple images that were emitted by the same object that have been traveling through space.
It is like going into a hall of mirrors where there are multiple images from the same source that have different perspectives and distortions from magnification and contractions of the light. All the images are real and none are “right”.
The two-dimensional image you see in a flat mirror, that you believe to be an accurate representation of you, has light traveling different distance from the contours of your face, passing through a tiny lens that magnifies and inverts it, and then is projected on a curved surface at the rear of your eye. How can this image be an accurate representation?
The telescope is not providing an accurate picture of the universe as it is but a collage of its existence.
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ecm
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A) “Light is a form of energy (a change n the amplitude of an energy field) and as such it will not disappear until being absorbed by matter.”
Good point, which looked at a different perspective, disproves that the image from 6.9 billion Ly away is 6.9B Ly old, as the energy after this vast amount of time and space would have been absorbed by the different matter in space.
B) “The two-dimensional image you see in a flat mirror, that you believe to be an accurate representation of you..”.
Objection–we do not see “flat” objects with our eyes but three-dimensional, making the vision very accurate.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Ecm,
Fields (electric and energy) and light radiate in all directions while matter concentrates around equatorial planes and considering the scarcity of matter in the solar system the assertion that it would be absorbed in 6.9 billion years (light years are distance not time and are based on the fallacy of a constant speed of light) is unwarranted.
Your eyes may be accurate, mine not so much. A mirror, like a photograph, is two dimensional and it is the brain that corrects the orientation and converts the absorbed energy into the images we see.
Herb
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ecm
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Another serious challenge to the Standard Model, and another quasi-promise for its reformation with “further discoveries”. This will never happen as cosmology since Einstein/Lemaitre’s time is a religion without a deity (or cult). Anybody that has factually challenged it has been purged from his field, much like in medicine.
Actually anybody who studied these two sciences with curiosity before 2021, instinctively felt the Covid pandemic and injection were false (based on the history of lies, attacks and censorship).
As the Webb Telescope further captures beautiful and spectacular “real-time” discoveries that upend the Standard Model, what will the outcome be? A real revolution in thinking or “ghosting” the facts as are done with the independent Covid researchers?
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Joe
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All science has been controlled by the khazarian Mafia for the past 1000 years!
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MICHAEL CLARKE
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Hi Folks,
A spiral rather than a ring can easily be confused when Billions of light years are condifered.
I favour the spiral rather than the ring.
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