Astronomers have discovered a giant structure in distant space that does not fit into any modern cosmological model. The "Big Ring" of galaxies, with a diameter of 1.3 billion light-years, poses a serious challenge to the fundamental principle of the Universe's uniformity.

What scientists found

The discovery was made by astronomer Alexia Lopez from the University of Central Lancashire. Light from this structure has been traveling to us for 6.9 billion years. In shape, the "Big Ring" resembles a wine bottle cork — a spiral that, from our perspective, appears as a perfect ring.

The structure does not belong to any known class of cosmic objects. The largest known ring-shaped formations — baryon acoustic oscillations — have a fixed diameter of about one billion light-years. The "Big Ring" is significantly larger and structured differently.

A double mystery

Complicating matters is the fact that in the same region of the sky and at the same distance, Lopez's team had already discovered another anomaly in 2021 — the "Giant Arc" with a length of nearly 3 billion light-years. Both structures are in the same area of space, making their existence even more mysterious.

Violation of a fundamental principle

According to the cosmological principle, on sufficiently large scales, the Universe should be homogeneous and isotropic — matter should be distributed roughly evenly. Theoretically, the maximum size of such structures should not exceed roughly 1.2 billion light-years.

Alexia Lopez noted that such structures were not expected in their theoretical model.

Possible explanations

For now, no existing theory can fully explain the nature of the "Big Ring." Among the hypotheses being considered are:

  • Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, which predicts the appearance of such rings
  • Cosmic strings — hypothetical thread-like defects in space-time that arose in the early Universe

However, none of these ideas has yet received convincing confirmation.

The study was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP).

In brief

Astronomer Alexia Lopez has discovered the "Big Ring" — a structure 1.3 billion light-years in diameter that violates the cosmological principle of the Universe's uniformity. Together with the previously found "Giant Arc," it does not fit into any known model. Scientists are currently unable to explain the nature of these giant formations, which may require a revision of fundamental ideas about the structure of the cosmos.